House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco is under siege by both petty criminals and lawless gangs that loot stores around the Bay Area.
Two people were finally arrested Thursday after police said they’d acquired over 15,000 stolen goods from stores like CVS, Nordstroms, GAP, Target, and more — $200,000 worth of ill-gotten property.
In early December, a San Francisco woman was arrested after stealing more than $40,000 in goods from a Target over 120 visits.
She was quickly released by a judge… and arrested again on suspicion of shoplifting a week later after she failed to show up to get her court-ordered ankle monitor.
The crime wave has San Francisco’s famously progressive residents on edge, the Associated Press reported.
Conservative critics, local district attorneys, retailers, and police all seem to agree the reason for the lawlessness is obvious: California’s downgraded shoplifting laws have emboldened thieves to ransack stores throughout the state.
But when asked about the crime spree — the Bay Area alone has reportedly seen over $1 billion in thefts so far this year — Pelosi said she had no idea where the “attitude of lawlessness” comes from.
“It’s absolutely outrageous. Obviously, it cannot continue,” Pelosi said. “But the fact is that there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where, maybe you do, but we cannot have that lawlessness. None of it is acceptable.”
Pelosi said she had a plan to stop the shoplifting crime spree.
But not by punishing thieves when they’re stealing, of course. And not by empowering police and prosecutors to take down criminals.
In the classic Democratic Party style, Pelosi plans to stop thieves… by further regulating online resellers.
“It has to be stopped. These people coordinate with each other and they plan traffic patterns and the rest so they can reach their goal and depart very quickly,” she claimed. “This isn’t like somebody stealing something to go home because they don’t have money to buy. This is about stealing for profit.”
Pelosi said an upcoming bill would address the problem of mass looting and theft in San Francisco by regulating online resellers like Amazon and eBay.
“Within that bill, the Energy and Commerce Committee has something called INFORM — legislation that would require those who are selling online especially is to establish their legitimacy as to where these products came from,” Pelosi said. “Because what people do is they steal things and they sell them online.”
“The Judiciary Committee has a bill, Save Shopping, which addresses the same problem in a different way in terms of holding platforms accountable and those selling things accountable for the prominence of those goods… out of the question that people should be able to think that they can just steal things, profit from them and not have accountability.”
Pelosi’s critics said the answer is far more simple — “Speaker Pelosi should look in the mirror.”
Speaker Pelosi should look in the mirror to see what caused the ‘attitude of lawlessness’ spreading across the country.
Democrat politicians defunded police, raised money for rioters, and pushed policies that are soft on crime. They own this crime wave.
pic.twitter.com/g8D7vh4U3D— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) December 15, 2021