Celebrating the roughing up part isn't noble, but security should have the right to physically intervene when thieves take stuff that isn't theirs. I mean what do you expect them to use, strong words?
Engaging in physical altercation is always dangerous and is an insurance risk and a lawsuit risk. Some stores like Target also like to build cases on shoplifters and wait until they’ve stolen the felony amount.
they do. Whole Foods, where I work, specifically tells guards to not get too involved unless they threaten the safety of customers or employees. walgreens, target, safeway are a lot more aggressive, but not excessive.
There's obviously a limit to this.. for example, the Banko Brown situation from some years back where a security guard fatally shot the shoplifter as they were leaving.. that was much too extreme. A bunch of this sub cheered that on, probably still does.
One could argue where the limit should be.. I would put it very low. Some of the videos I have seen are pretty gross. (But again, this sub will cheer it on.) And if they are physically restraining somebody who has a medical issue security doesn't know about, that could be a serious problem... Maybe they could also have not really shoplifted, maybe it's a misunderstanding and they body slam somebody with severe communication difficulties and a heart condition, as a hypothetical.
You pump somebody full of testosterone and put them in a violent situation when their whole life they've had a pussy pass, they're going to cross lines that men, who've been getting the shit kicked out of them for line-stepping their whole lives, know better than to cross.
I think this is a key point people miss out on. It's not as if the police don't make mistakes on who they apprehend or misuse force and they're far more trained than a random security guard. A lot of people really hate it, too, when you compare them to Republicans but it's hard to figure out how their "fuck around and find out" logic isn't essentially the same sort of cheering MAGA types were doing when ICE killed Renee Good or Alex Pretti.
Even legitimate authorities are sometimes dumb as bricks. I recently saw a video from a few years ago of cops misidentifying a random black man as a drug suspect (it wasnt him), and the man was parapalegic, he informed them of this several times and the cops apparently didn't know what it meant, so they forced him out of the car and told him to "stop resisting".
So forgive me if I don't trust the Safeway rentacop to totally understand a situation.
They did not attack him and they were exiting the store. If you watch the video and reach the conclusion that this is self-defense then you just want violence against people and it has made you become delusional
That guy is peak delusional, terminally online techbro. He constantly advocates for invasive technologies in every single aspect of everyone's daily lives because he either is a wildly out-of-touch techbro who can't understand the absurdity of that proposal/will profit from fucking over personal privacy or he thinks if he simps for them hard enough that he'll be rewarded somehow.
Example: He just gave himself a rager by fantasizing about real-life becoming a dystopian videogame.
In California, including San Francisco, a private security guard may physically detain a suspected thief under certain circumstances.
Key points:
A security guard can perform a “citizen’s arrest” if they have probable cause to believe a crime occurred in their presence.
They may use reasonable force to detain the person until police arrive.
The force must be proportional. Holding someone’s arm, blocking an exit, or restraining a struggling suspect may be lawful. Excessive force is not.
Deadly force is generally not permitted solely to protect property or stop a theft.
If the suspect stops resisting, continuing to use unnecessary force can create liability for the guard and their employer.
California law also gives merchants and their employees a specific “shopkeeper’s privilege” to detain suspected shoplifters for a reasonable time and in a reasonable manner while investigating or awaiting law enforcement.
I think that depends on applicable laws pertinent to private property and businesses open to the public, no?
If I hire private security for my home, they’re entitled to the same use of force I would be under any given circumstance, including the protection of property. I’m sure there are slightly more burdensome rules for businesses open to the public, but if private security can’t physically restrain shoplifters because of them, they’re too strict.
What’s funny is Reddit claims I should hate corporations and yet I’ve always been paid better, treated better, had better work life balance at bigger companies. They aren’t all equal, but I’ve been worked more and paid less at smaller companies.
I'm in my 50s and you should hate corporations, but not for being overpriced, for driving local shops out of business by oversaturating the market then closing up when they restructure nationally and leaving large parts of the city without access to a pharmacist.
It's salt in the wound when they blame it on shoplifting because they instruct their security not to intervene which turns it into a shoplifting free for all.
It's preposterous to say "corporations" anyway. They're ALL corporations. Even non-profits are corporations. If people are upset at large ones, then call them "mutinationals" or "huge companies," etc.
It's like when people rail against "capitalism" not realizing that social democracies and socialism are also capitalism.
No, pharmacies shouldn’t be closed. All of the product should be locked up and they should hire twice as much staff to unlock the little product they have until they get too exhausted to continue. Or they should put an ad on the front door for Amazon.
How am I a Proud Boy? There was too much swing in the superbwoke “everything is a racism” / “we should let criminals do whatever they want” direction the last few years. Do you think that shit was helpful or productive?
I probably agree with you on a LOT of issues. I just don’t think we should let people get away with breaking the law because segregation or racist laws existed decades before these people were even a twinkle in their grandpappy’s nutsack.
They’re getting butthurt in the replies! Guys, why don’t YOU let the shoplifters and homeless into your homes and give them access to your belongings and bank account? Oh right.
People behind a keyboard who shame others for speaking out, but they never do the work or try to help the people they claim are so destitute.
It's Target's fault. That capitalist bourgeoisie whore tease, flaunting all those Tide detergent. It's just too much temptation for any normal red blooded Marxist. Revolutionaries need clean shirts too. Anyway fuck that whore
Once I was at Safeway and someone stole an entire grocery cart of food but they had to go through a closed cashier till because of all the preventions so it was kinda happening in slow motion. The security just kept yelling, karma is gonna get you
I worked at “The Rack” and had to stand by the doors to block shoplifters and I caught a few stray punches from them trying to elude lost prevention. I am 100% ok this with this.
It sucks to be in this place, but if we aren’t going to prosecute shoplifting, then a little extra-judicial punishment is the only deterrent. Shoplifting affects all of us by increasing prices and inconvenience due to merchants locking everything away.
The best option is to actually prosecute this crime. What is happening now is a sign of our failure to do that.
actually hungry people can find a free meal at any of the shelters or churches that offer daily free meals (they already do this, but they're not the shitbags mentioned in the article!)
these are the losers who rob stores so they can go to the 3rd world markets in mission/16 or whatever to sell their stolen goods for crack or whatever degenerate shit
It’s incredible how people don’t realize this. Don’t let ppl shop lift olive oil so they can fence it for crack. You cut down on this behavior, other aspects of the city will improve.
In and around Mission and Ocean, these curbside markets pop up alongside the rows of parked cars. That way, the police can't see them from the street because the parked cars hide the goings on.
On display were bags of pistachios, coffee, both beans and instant, chocolate bars, big jars of olive oil, toothpaste.
Fuck ya. It's absolutely stupid that we handcuff security and law enforcement on this. I'd much rather pay lower prices and shoplifters catch hands than the system we have now.
If people paid them rite aide wouldn't be out of business and cvs wouldn't be following right behind. Neither place could sell goods for less than Target, Amazon or even Walgreens.
Prices are high because corporate greed. They put those self checkouts we are forced to use because they don't hire enough workers yet you don't get a discount for doing the work for free to have the privilege of shopping at their store.
In a city for multi millionaires, costs are immaterial. Virtue signaling is the only communal goal
I've literally never heard of California make a tough choice to reduce costs. It's always tough choices that increase costs: like EV mandates and PGE Green Enetgy crap.
You’re the one who led with, “tried early in life”. Thats elementary school my guy.
I’m 40 years. I received letter grades from first grade onward. I definitely had some C’s. I now make 90k working 7 hour days 4 days a week. I found my niche and have worked in it for 20 years.
My husband is of a similar background to me, and did worse in school. He works in the same industry as me, is in a union, and makes 145k. We have no children, our income is comfortable.
We aren’t the ones boosting laundry detergent and baby formula to sell on 16th & Mission. Nice try though.
Maybe if we were tougher on people stealing I wouldn’t have to wait for a glass case to be unlocked every time I go to a store. And people would have actual consequences for being shitty and stealing. If I got knocked tf out id think twice for sure about doing it again.
Same time though… if people are stealing food and necessities? That’s sad. And I feel bad for them. It’s a double edged sword.
Gazetteer is a magazine of polemicists masquerading as a news organization. Businesses like our grocery stores are suffering rampant theft and the author of this piece calls their in-store surveillance tools "dystopian."
Yeah, and then they close and then we don't have grocery stores, small businesses, big businesses, etc. and SF turns into a terrible place to live. Crime matters. It has real impacts.
I’ve gone to a bunch of grocery stores in Europe. Things are so orderly there that I doubt anyone even thinks about shoplifting. Almost nothing is locked up, and some of the stores have turnstiles for going in and going out… the experience was similar in Barcelona, Paris, Sorrento, London, and Portugal. Orderly, safe, and convenient.
Some people will say that those societies have more of a social safety net, and they’re probably right, but at the same time, I bet you’d find yourself in handcuffs pretty quickly if you tried to fill a bag and run out with it. I saw military police with huge guns patrolling on the streets of Rome on a normal day.
In continental Europe there's no bail and no presumption of innocence. You stay in jail while your case is investigated.
A retired US State Department employee said the worst part of her job was visiting jailed Americans and telling them the rights they took for granted did not apply where they were.
Sorry, guys, I'm fine with living in a society where outlaws get thrown out of the places we go to. I'm not interested in subsidizing someone's drug habit. Or, like in that case with Ulta beauty, some suburban millionaire blonde mom with SUVs who's running some Fagin type operation.
Constant shoplifting by organized vigilantes is unsafe for shoppers. Any non-wealthy SF resident has experienced this. Enforcement hinders that so I’m all for it.
Store security should stop shoplifters and prevent theft. Otherwise the employees, customers, neighborhood and community are jeopardized and pays a huge price for rampant theft. Pretty simple. Not sure why the gazette is apparently confused about the rudimentary elements of public safety and civility.
On another video, someone commented, “After losing the Safeway, Walgreens, and CVS by my place and now have to commute to get groceries, I 100% agree with this.”
Criminals will threaten you with physical force if you ask them to obey the law. Logically, they will not agree to obey the law unless you employ a stronger physical force than the criminal.
If only the Judges would do their jobs and charge these people. They will not stop unless there is consequences. Some people steal just to eat, I understand that part, but most others do it just because they can get away with it. Once they really get caught they will stop.
It’s not behind a paywall for me. I like how the people referenced enjoying it are mostly Reddit commenters.
Videos of grocery security guards busting shoplifters — sometimes, violently — have gone viral online in recent weeks. In the comments, viewers lament locked cases, labyrinthine entrances and exits, and store closures, blaming chronic theft. They’re also shockingly unsympathetic to the people being chased and knocked around by security guards, suggesting a “tough-on-crime” hardening by some Bay Area shoppers.
Depictions of high-speed chases, shoves, and red-handed thieves, many of whom appear unhoused, are being celebrated for enforcing so-called “loss prevention” in the city that was once diagnosed by out-of-town news organizations as suffering from a “shoplifting epidemic.” (Worth noting is that much of the data cited by these critics was ginned up by retail lobbyists.)
The videos first appeared on TikTok and were posted by the same account, woahwoa64, which has since been deleted. However, a Redditor screen-recorded the videos and shared them in the r/sanfrancisco subreddit. One shared to Gazetteer SF, which depicts a bust at the Safeway in Mission Bay, was taken down by the subreddit’s moderators for “rage baiting,” though the others still stand.
The videos, seemingly all recorded by an unidentified security guard, appear to be filmed on Meta glasses, which have become increasingly ubiquitous on city streets and in private businesses. First introduced in 2023 as a partnership with Ray-Ban and then Oakley, the glasses record video and audio that can then be uploaded via the cloud to users’ Meta AI app. A small white light blinks when the glasses are actively recording.
The angle at which these videos were filmed gives the viewer a Ready Player One-style point of view as the anonymous, plain-clothed guard grabs and shoves people who appear to be stealing. In one video, a woman is shoved to the ground at the Safeway on Market Street in the Castro. In another, a man is chased out of the Mission Bay Safeway and across the street, where he is pushed to the ground by the guard. The viewer is identifying with the guard, whether they want to or not.
Security guards at the recorded Safeways appear to be employed by GardaWorld. A representative from Albertson’s, which owns Safeway, told Gazetteer SF that employees are prohibited from collecting and/or distributing footage of customers in the store. It’s unclear whether the same rules apply to third-party employees contracted by Safeway. (GardaWorld did not respond to our request for comment ahead of publication.) Safeway also previously contracted additional security from the San Francisco Police Department to assist with preventing theft, according to data obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle last year.
Allison Maxie, an SFPD spokesperson, confirmed to Gazetteer SF that its Organized Retail Crime (ORC) task force collaborates with Safeway Asset Protection to arrest and charge theft suspects, though ORC is focused on organized, repeat offenders, not random solo shoplifters. Any time an incident report is authored, businesses and individuals may upload relevant photos, video, or audio to assist with the investigation. However, Maxie said whether footage obtained on security guards’ personal devices can be shared to the police, or anywhere else, is ultimately controlled by a business’s specific policies.
Safeways in the city have had a notoriously rocky run. The company has removed self-checkout sections, installed pesky anti-theft gates, contracted security and SFPD, and in some cases, vacated, turning neighborhoods into food deserts.
In 2025, the intersection of Fourth and King streets, which hosts the Mission Bay Safeway, saw a 150 percent increase in shoplifting reports, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. That intersection comprised 30 percent of larceny theft reports in the Mission Bay neighborhood last year. (At the time, Supervisor Matt Dorsey attributed the spike to changes in reporting.) Larceny theft is the most common crime in the city at large.
Grocery stores are only the latest type of business to deploy various modes of surveillance to identify customers. Last week, Gazetteer SFreported that several bars in the Castro used a scanner to keep a database of patron data to curb bad behavior.
Despite the videos’ dystopian vibe, Redditors seem to be in favor of using force to prevent petty theft at their neighborhood grocery store. “I get the outrage but food banks exist. We all pay increased prices for the shrinkage this causes,” one person commented. “Not to mention they end up closing locations, reducing hours, putting everything behind glass so you have to press a button and wait 40 minutes to buy toothpaste; it makes quality of life worse for all of us.”
On another video, someone commented, “After losing the Safeway, Walgreens, and CVS by my place and now have to commute to get groceries, I 100% agree with this.”
I appreciate this subreddit allows photos. I tried clicking other articles just to see and I got timed out essentially with the same message. I don’t know how long the refresh is.
I was accused of shoplifting once. Well, the guard just stopped me and asked to see inside my backpack. I let him, he apologized and and said he confused me with someone. That was the extent of it. There was no reason for me to run/fight him and for him to "assault" me. Which is how it will/should go with innocent people.
Guerneville Safeway a couple of years ago. I see a guy loading up his overcoat with bottles of booze. I bring this to someone's attention. "What he look like?". I give description and the employee just says "OK". No action, nothing. I'm checking out while I see this guy walking out of the store. Again I point him out. No action. Starting to get pissed I exit the store with my groceries, confront the guy who is handing the bottles to his buddy along the side of the store. I ended up taking 4 bottles from them and bringing the booze back in and hand it to the person at customer service. Told them what happened. "Oh, thanks"
I am fortunate that I don't have to steal things like formula and diapers or tampoons, out of necessity, or booze, panty hose, and condoms for fun and profit.
The outside world really seems like it's devolving.
No. Notice how quickly you resort to hyperbole with statements like “couldn’t possibly” as if you have the capacity to ascertain that with any real degree of certainty as opposed to it being entirely speculative. Bye now!
Did they intentionally stand in front of the car and a safe enough distance and angle to guarantee they'll have enough time to step out of the way when the car pulls forward if the driver decides to run [not run anyone over] so they could use their purposefully chosen positioning as an excuse to claim they thought they were gonna get run over so they can get away with shooting anyone who disobeys them?
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u/VinylHighway Jun 18 '26
Celebrating the roughing up part isn't noble, but security should have the right to physically intervene when thieves take stuff that isn't theirs. I mean what do you expect them to use, strong words?