At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain's national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.

Brendan Dugan, the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, called San Francisco "one of the epicenters of organized retail crime" and said employees were instructed not to pursue suspected thieves because encounters had become too dangerous.

"We've had incidents where our security officers are assaulted on a pretty regular basis in San Francisco," Dugan said.

And yes incentives matter:

The retail executives and police officers emphasized the role of organized crime in the thefts. And they told the supervisors that Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950, had emboldened thieves.

Here is more from the NYT, via Ilya Novak.