The San Francisco Police Department Only Solves 3% Of Theft Cases. Why Are London Breed And Bill Scott Misleading The Public About It?
“He’s in jail,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said about a man caught on a viral video stealing from a local pharmacy: “I want to send a message to others who have that idea. You will go to jail. We will catch you. So, make no mistakes about that.”
The chief followed that promise with a boast: “We are very good at what we do. We are committed to what we do. And we are going to keep going until we catch the people who are responsible for these crimes.”
The problem? It’s simply not true.
Let’s start with the definition of felony theft. This is a term for a group of offenses that involve stealing someone’s property. It often means shoplifting, where a person stole over $950 worth of goods from a store. In San Francisco, the police only solve 3% of these cases. So, for every 100 people who walk into a Target, help themselves to an iPad, and walk out without paying for it, the San Francisco police only identify and arrest three of those people. According to their own data maintained at the San Francisco Police Department Clearance Rates Dashboard, the police department leaves 97 out of every 100 felony thefts unsolved.
Similarly sized cities like Charlotte, Denver, and Salt Lake City all solve roughly three times as many theft cases as their counterparts in the San Francisco Police Department. Even much larger cities solve more of these crimes than San Francisco does, according to the most recent data from 2019 collected in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report. For example, Phoenix solves nearly four times the percentage of cases. The Los Angeles and San Diego police departments, too, solve a significantly higher percentage of felony theft cases.
If the San Francisco police are solving so few serious felony theft cases, far fewer than their counterparts in other cities, then why did Mayor London Breed, standing alongside SFPD Chief Bill Scott, label as “extraordinary” the work of the police department “to bring people to justice” in these cases?
Breed also made another statement recently which was contrary to the police department’s own statistics: “When you come to San Francisco and commit a crime, you will be arrested by this police department.”
“You will be arrested.”
But you won’t be arrested for felony theft--at least 97% of the time.
One explanation for why there are almost no felony theft arrests could be that the police department is overloaded by an uptick in felony theft cases. However, thefts like these are actually down in San Francisco, so that can’t be it.
Another explanation could be that the police department doesn't believe that arresting people for these crimes is important. But Chief Scott himself recently countered this potential explanation: “We need to make arrests, make no mistake about it. We need to hold people accountable.”
A third possibility is that the police department does not have the capability to make arrests in these types of cases. But that, too, isn’t the case. The police tracked down and arrested the man who stole from Walgreens, after the video circulated and went viral. It appears that when it is embarrassing for the police department, these cases can actually be solved.
“Certainly there has to be greater certainty in terms of sanctions,” David Weisburd, professor at George Mason University, told SF Watch. “The numbers do seem very low in San Francisco, but even if they were three times what they are now you would still be missing 90 percent of the events.”
Weisburd also cautioned against equating accountability with incarceration (“You don't want to put large numbers of people in jail that commit minor crimes”) or arrest and prosecution as the only way to reduce theft cases (for example, retail stores can make changes to reduce the opportunity for theft in their stores).