Security
Ceiling: Audrey Yang of Two Birds clothing on
Castro Street points to part of the store's camera
setup, designed to deter and record those who would
rather not pay for merchandise. Photo
by Pamela Gerard
A sample jacket from Lola San
Francisco, $3,000 worth of clothes from Two Birds, and some
unpleasant scenes with unfamiliar homeless men: shoplifting
and quality-of-life crimes are up on 24th Street, according to
local merchants.
“It’s out of control,” said
Bernie Melvin of Bernie’s café on 24th Street near Noe. In
early June, she called 911 three days in a row to report
issues with belligerent and unbalanced homeless men. “I’ve
never had to do that in five years.”
Just for Fun owner David Eiland
compared the first half of this year to the days before beat
cops patrolled the commercial strip.
“There are more people
panhandling, more shopping carts, and these are people we’ve
not seen before,” he said. “It’s an element that disappeared
when we got beat cops.”
Police reports in the Noe
Valley Voice show an increase in shoplifting and
public nuisance crimes since January. Melvin and others see a
correlation with the absence of Officer Lorraine Lombardo, the
street’s regular foot patrol police officer.
Lombardo returned to 24th Street
in mid-June following a two-month vacation, one that had been
carefully timed to precede a wave of police retirements
expected to shrink the force this summer. What she had not
prepared for was the injury that sidelined her for another two
months prior to her vacation.
Dispelling rumors of possible
retirement, Lombardo said she is happy to be back and plans to
stay. Catching up on the 24th Street beat will not be hard,
she said.
“All I have to do is go to
Bernie’s, and I find it all out in a half hour,” she said.
“That’s my sub police station.”
Already, she’s encountered two
people who were causing quality-of-life problems. They’ve seen
her and know she’s keeping an eye on them, she said. That
familiarity is what makes community policing so successful at
preventing crime, she said.
“The uniform takes it down a
notch, that’s for sure,” she said.
It’s All Relative
Mission Police Station Captain
Robert Moser said he had been staffing the 24th Street beat
regularly in Lombardo’s absence.
“We might have seen what can be
considered an increased wave of shoplifting in that area, but
I haven’t seen anything off the charts for what’s happening
district-wide,” he said.
Lombardo was once one of two
officers who walked the beat in the early 1990s, but budget
cuts have reduced the position to one. Fewer police means
Lombardo also has to leave her beat when other needs arise,
like working the Pride Parade or trial races for the America’s
Cup. Consequently, 24th Street has less than one full-time
beat officer.
Clothing designer Lola Herrera
has been in her shop, Lola San Francisco, on Castro Street,
for about a year and a half, but said she hasn’t seen a police
officer in the vicinity.
“I think if there was some
[police] presence, it would definitely make a difference,”
said Herrera, who lost a coat sample worth about $850 to two
shoplifters in May.
The same quick-fingered pair hit
Two Birds, a clothing store three doors south of Lola.
Owner Audrey Yang said her store
lost $3,000 worth of clothes.
“They got us pretty bad,” she
said.
Not all crimes are reported to
the police, especially if victims feel the suspects are long
gone. Moser said a report should be made regardless.
“Just because they’ve left one
location doesn’t mean they aren’t going to go to another
location,” he said. “The more information we have, the better
we can respond to the crime and the better chance we have of
apprehending the suspect.”
Merchants also have a phone tree
to alert each other to crimes, but it is in the process of
being updated by Susanna Taylor of Two Birds.
Parklets No Problem
Many residents had worried that
the street’s two open-space parklets would be a magnet for the
homeless and mentally ill, but despite an uptick in reported
incidents, those fears have not been realized, say business
owners.
“There are no issues with the
parklets,” said Eiland, who tends to the parklet outside his
store. “They’ve been tremendously successful.”
Martha Monroy, owner of Martha
& Bros, says the parklet outside her shop has had no
problems, and Charles Ng, who owns Holey Bagel to the west,
agreed.
David Hurley, who has lived
across the street for 10 years, said the parklets may have had
a salutary effect on crime.
“It’s the same as it always was,
if not less,” he said. “The park has been great.”
