A Safeway security guard in San Francisco recently told reporters he witnessed 60 to 100 thefts during a single shift. Not per week. Not per month. Per shift. The store at 3350 Mission Street was hemorrhaging an estimated $7,000 a day to shoplifters.

So Safeway closed it. And now the city wants to make that illegal.

San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood is pushing a new measure that would penalize grocery stores for shutting down locations in the city. The liberal proposal would punish retailers for doing the math on operating in a place where theft has been effectively decriminalized. The city that won't prosecute shoplifters has decided to go after the shoplifted instead.

This isn't Mahmood's first brush with creative governance, but the logic here is mindboggling. San Francisco spent years telling prosecutors to go easy on retail theft. Stores got robbed blind. Stores left. And now leaving is the offense. It's like a robber breaking into a home and then suing the homeowner when he cuts himself on the broken glass of the window he punched open to get into the house.

The Safeway in the Fillmore District on Webster Street operated for 40 years before the chain finally pulled the plug. The closure was originally planned for March 2024, but Safeway extended operations for 11 months — finally shutting down on February 7, 2025 — citing "due to ongoing concerns about associate and customer safety, as well as persistent issues with theft." Bringing the building up to code would have cost between $2 million and $4 million, money that's hard to justify when thousands of dollars of inventory walks out the front door every afternoon.

The closure gutted access for residents in the Fillmore and neighboring Japantown, who now have fewer options for groceries. That's a real problem for real people. But Mahmood's answer isn't to make the stores safer to operate. Or to prosecute the criminals who steal. It's to punish the establishments who shut their doors.

This is a level of mental gymnastics that is genuinely impressive for its stupidity.

Mayor Daniel Lurie, who replaced London Breed, inherited a city where the grocery store crisis was already baked in. The question facing his administration isn't complicated: do you fix the conditions that drove retailers out, or do you build a legal fence around the ones who haven't left yet? Mahmood chose the fence.

There's a pattern forming in progressive cities — New York's Zohran Mamdani has floated similar ideas — where the government response to a problem it created is to criminalize the private sector's response to that problem.

Safeway didn't close a 40-year location because it hated San Francisco. The city made it impossible to operate, and now the Democrats who run the city want to make it impossible to leave. That's not a grocery policy. That's a hostage situation.