Is the tide turning against crime in San Francisco? How about Minnesota?
Since Minnesota seems to adopt only the worst ideas from California, it pays to monitor events on the left coast.
After the infamous sacking of the local Louis Vuitton store, San Francisco has flooded the tony Union Square shopping district with police and plywood.
Minnesota’s Twin Cities had its own encounter with California-style mass-shoplifting last week on Black Friday. At the same time on Friday evening, groups of shoplifters simultaneously hit three separate Best Buy outlets, one each in the north, south and east suburban areas. (Update: Maplewood, MN, police say they hope to make arrests soon in the case.)
The San Francisco heists have reverberated across the country. In the city, the thefts have spurred the usually soft-on-crime San Francisco District Attorney to hand down nine felony indictments. In New York, Wall Street executives are pleading with J.P. Morgan bankers to move a January conference out of the City by the Bay because of “mayhem” levels of San Francisco crime.
Across the Bay, the City of Oakland is backing away from earlier plans to defund the police force. The city of Walnut Creek, California, is looking into hiring more police after the local Nordstrom’s was hit in a mass shoplifting raid.
Back in Minnesota, the trial of Brooklyn Center police officer Kimberly Potter in the accidental killing of Duante Wright has begun. The City of Brooklyn Center was to consider Tuesday night a proposal to defund the police force by $1.2 million, but postponed the vote until later in December.
In San Francisco, residents of the suburban-like, Marina District neighborhood have hired private security to supplement the City’s police force to fight local crime. San Francisco has a unique feature, a private police force known as Patrol Special Police. These privately-hired, nonsworn officers (with powers of arrest) operate under the auspices of the City’s regular police department, an idea that originated in the Gold Rush days and has survived for 174 years.
More police, less police, or private police—the next few weeks will be critical for the future of both the Twin Cities and the Bay Area.