A Target store in San Francisco has locked its entire product range behind security glass as crime in the city spirals out of control.
A video posted on TikTok on April 20 shows all of the items in the store locked away from customers.
According to geotagged imagery, some products at the store on Folsom Street were behind glass since at least October of last year, WNCT reported.
An abandoned Portland tavern burned to the ground this week in a blaze sparked by squatters who had been harassing the crime-riddled community for more than a year.
Firefighters tried in vain Wednesday to beat back flames that consumed the former Farmer’s Barn Tavern in north Portland, which neighbor Dusty McCord said was “clearly a time bomb waiting to go off.”
He said squatters have been menacing the neighborhood since they besieged the bar that closed in 2018, threatening residents with guns, sometimes physically attacking them — and frequently cutting down trees to make campfires.
Chicago’s interim police chief is to retire after only month in the job – stepping down after a series of headline-grabbing crimes, on the same day as the ultra-progressive new mayor takes office but insisting that his decision was made months ago.
Eric Carter, the interim superintendent, will retire on May 15 after 30 years on the force.
He took over when David Brown resigned after the February 28 mayoral election. Brown turns 63 in September, which is the mandatory CPD retirement age.
Policing Chicago in 2023:
Potentially fatal attack, immediately followed by street "performance." pic.twitter.com/M0YPm3nPzH
— Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) April 22, 2023
As much trash as I’ve talked about this city, this state, it’s the closest thing to home I’ve had
Like so many wannabe actors before me, I came to this gritty city with big dreams of “making it” in Tinseltown. I thought I wanted to be an actress until I got here and realized that driving around begging casting directors for approval wasn’t for me. Nonetheless, I stayed in Los Angeles — and over the last sixteen years, this big, messy, giant suburban sprawl has become a part of me.
My husband and I have agonized over the decision of whether to stay or go. Making a cost-benefit analysis — like whether to stay near family in perfect weather or go where we can provide a better quality of life for our daughter in a place with unbearable heat — has felt like trying to solve an impossible math equation. You can’t put a price on either of those things — but as Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
From crime to climate protesters, the predictable result of not upholding the law is more lawlessness
It is always interesting to see how far things can run if the authorities let them. If you tour around American cities these days – especially Democrat-run cities – you can see the results everywhere.
Legalise or effectively legalise drugs – as in New York and other places – and you will soon see and smell them everywhere. In the middle of the day, you will witness people lighting or shooting up. All other judgments aside, it can be said with a fair degree of certainty that the person before you is not going to contribute to the economy that day. Nor perhaps for the remainder of their life.
Oakland has always been a gritty city—the tough-luck twin to wealthy San Francisco. Under newly elected Alameda County District Attorney Pam Price, Oakland could be headed for a fate much darker than gritty. Price has been following the de-prosecution and decarceration playbook of radical district attorneys across the United States. If she stays on that course, Oakland is in for a “hella tough time,” to use the language of the Bay Area.
It would be funny were it not so incredibly pathetic. A county-run drug counseling center for homeless drug addicts in Portland had to be shut down and some of its employees were dumped because of drug use and “inappropriate relations” between employees. In other words, a drug and sex scandal shut down the Multnomah County Behavioral Health Resource Center.
“Portland is not Portlandia anymore.”
It’s something we say around here, and it resonates, because the series starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein was both popular and infamous depending on who you talked to and their opinion of the effect the show had on Portland. But the civic time and tenor depicted on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) series is definitely history now.
Chalk it up to that standard conservative talking point: the decline of Blue cities under Democratic “leadership.”
On Monday, the outdoor fitness retailer REI announced it will close its only remaining store in Portland in February 2024.
The company emailed REI members to explain that the location could no longer guarantee the safety of employees and patrons, the local NBC outlet reported. Other major-chain stores throughout the U.S. have also closed, citing security issues, including a Whole Foods in downtown San Francisco last week and various Starbucks locations last year, including two in Portland.
People complain that Americans are insincere with their friendly greetings, but the coffee barista who’d just served me a £4.50 latte sounded like he meant it when he thanked me for being a ‘loyal customer’.
After all, apart from him, his two under-employed colleagues, and a solitary couple poring over a laptop in a distant corner of one of San Francisco’s largest and smartest coffee shops, we were entirely alone.
At this hour, the establishment — Joe & The Juice on Market Street, the city’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfare — would once have been heaving with thrusting young technology workers stocking up on pricey coffee and ‘cold-pressed’ fruit juice before heading off into their gleaming offices to spearhead the digital revolution.
April is the cruellest month — or at least it is in San Francisco. The city is already well known for its chronic problems with homelessness, drug abuse and crime, but the negative headlines are now piling up.
Apparently, San Francisco mayor London Breed has been feeling downright smug about the fact that Cash App founder Bob Lee did not die at the hands of a random homeless person but, instead, was allegedly murdered by someone he knew. That would be a decent boast if San Francisco were an otherwise clean and well-run city…but it’s not. It’s still a decayed basket case, as is vividly illustrated by a widely circulated video showing a homeless woman and her baby moments after she gave birth on the street.
NEWS & Education ONLY
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Don’t Do Drugs. The reality of drug use is tough and these images are strong, but necessary to show how destructive narcotics are to society.San Francisco, California.— (@ppv_tahoe) Woman gives birth on the street after smoking crack all afternoon… pic.twitter.com/n6kbivg0uX
— PPV-TAHOE – News Journalist (@ppv_tahoe) April 9, 2023
Inside the assault on meritocracy
In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them — “The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate,” in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before.
If it weren’t so serious, Gavin Newsom’s current assault on red states would be hilarious. What he is peddling as “democracy” is totalitarianism in its worst form. What’s frightening is that there are millions of voters throughout America who will lap up what he’s selling.
Whole Foods on Monday shut down its ritzy new flagship store in San Francisco, after just a year in operation, citing crime and safety concerns.
I wrote about that astonishing event yesterday, brought on by the city’s failure to enforce its own laws, noting that the company had a good customer base and had shelled out big to make the place attractive, but that was no match for the chaos the one-party government had allowed the area to fall into. Whole Foods may have had a punchbowl for themselves and its customers, but with the city’s coddling of bums and criminals, someone dropped a deuce in it.
