‘Pitchforks and torches’ after Nordstrom leaves San Francisco

A spokesperson for Westfield told SFGATE, “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area.” The spokesperson also blamed “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.”

To District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents the area in which the stores are located, the saga is similar to when a Whole Foods in his district announced last month that it would close because of public safety concerns.

“Since my appointment to the board, I have been hearing that the mall and its tenants have real public safety concerns,” he told SFGATE on Tuesday. “I understand and share those concerns, and I chose to seek this job because of them.”

Dorsey, a political moderate, was appointed to the Board of Supervisors last year by Mayor London Breed. His appointment was controversial to progressives because he previously worked as a communications director for the San Francisco Police Department. After the Whole Foods closure was announced, Dorsey unveiled plans to introduce a charter amendment that would mandate minimum staffing levels for San Francisco police officers.

Property crime has been a persistent problem for San Francisco — it has higher rates of property crime than other similarly sized cities — and Dorsey has said he believes that’s a direct result of not having enough police officers, who are currently prioritizing violent crimes. After the news of Nordstrom’s departure, Dorsey doubled down on his proposal, saying the mall had asked for more patrols.

“With the current police staffing, we can’t deal with lower-level quality of life issues,” Dorsey said. “The reason we can’t get there is because we’re 500-plus officers short.”

Dorsey’s analysis shows San Francisco currently has 1,514 full-duty sworn officers to serve a population of more than 800,000 residents.

Some progressive critics would argue Dorsey is cynically using the news of businesses closures to push for more resources for his old friends at the department (“My copaganda supervisor is the worstttttt,” wrote one Twitter user). Some would even argue that the businesses themselves are inflating crime fears to cover for poor business decisions. One San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece suggested that Whole Foods should not have opened “a 63,737-square-foot store stocked with gourmet cheese and sustainable caviar in a neighborhood where no one can afford to shop there.” (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms).

Dorsey, who defeated his more progressive challenger Honey Mahogany in last November’s election, believes progressives and members and the media are out of touch when it comes to crime discourse. If anything, he said, he’s perceived as too soft on crime. He said that the Nordstrom closure is already adding fuel to the fire residents are using to craft “torches.”

“I hear this from residents a lot: ‘I appreciate you’re proposing policies, but what are you going to do right now about the drug scene in front of my house?’” Dorsey said. “I have been in community meeting after community meeting, and I have never seen San Franciscans as close to pitchforks and torches as they are now. I get yelled at by residents, and I understand their impatience.”

He said that his constituents reacted extremely negatively to the Chronicle opinion piece on Whole Foods. The piece attempted to liken the situation to when Walgreens tried to blame the closure of five San Francisco locations on crime, but SEC filings had indicated the chain was already looking to close 200 locations nationwide to cut costs. A Walgreens executive later said that the company “cried too much” about retail theft when discussing reasons behind closures.

The Chronicle piece featured anonymous Whole Foods employees who alleged that the “company almost certainly didn’t do its due diligence about the neighborhood before signing the lease,” and that store management made “dubious decisions, like putting the liquor section by an exit and hiring poorly trained guards who tended to escalate confrontations into violence.” Dorsey, who said he shopped at that Whole Foods location, argued that the opinion piece did not actually disprove the fact that the location faced public safety problems. He added that the struggles facing the neighborhood have worsened in recent years, though he also feels strongly that the residents of his district should not simply accept the idea that because of where they live, they don’t deserve access to a high-quality grocery store.

“For people in my district to read that it was somehow silly for us to think we could have a Whole Foods, that didn’t go over well,” he said. “It’s really gaslighting people to say that what we’re experiencing in San Francisco is the way it’s always been. We know better. You’re asking us to disbelieve our eyes in the neighborhood and also in the supermarket.”

He said that similar attempts to argue that the Nordstrom closure had nothing to do with retail theft or the city’s public drug use will be similarly misguided.

Dorsey is so confident that public opinion is on his side when it comes to increased police staffing that he delivered a plea to businesses who are also considering closing locations in the city: “I know it’s been a difficult few years, people have made sacrifices and San Francisco is not coming back as fast as we’d like, but the fundamentals remain strong and there’s cause for optimism,” he said.

“The nice thing about a charter amendment is that it will send a message on election night to businesses considering whether to stay that voters are committed to public safety,” he added.

Dorsey believes he is making good progress in achieving the six Board of Supervisors votes necessary to place the amendment on the March 2024 ballot without having to resort to an expensive signature-gathering campaign.

When asked whether the charter amendment would include language that worked to increase department efficiency, in light of anecdotes of officers not doing their jobs and a study that found SFPD “solves fewer crimes despite larger staffing per city resident and costs per area patrolled” than other California jurisdictions, Dorsey said he wants to limit the amendment to staffing.

“Even if we didn’t have public safety issues in San Francisco, we would still have a police staffing crisis that deserves to be solved,” he said. “We’ve been understaffed for 30 years, so let’s just fix this. The great thing about democracy is that on the board we can agree to disagree, and then with a charter amendment, take it to voters and see what they think.”