San Francisco’s crime spree has taken a new twist: it has exploded out of its shattered downtown into areas residents thought were still safe — despite its mayor claiming the city is beating the criminals.
Mayor Landon Breed touted declining crime numbers in January, saying in a statement that “our work around public safety is making a difference.”
But police statistics analyzed by The Post show that the city’s previously quieter residential areas are instead being hit hard with burglary — and shopkeepers in those areas told The Post they’re living on edge.
While crime in the notorious Tenderloin district and the surrounding downtown area is down compared with this time last year, burglary is up by 44% in 2024 in San Francisco’s more residential Taraval police district. Burglaries are also up by 19% in Ingleside and 6.2% in the Richmond neighborhood.
“It never occurred to me that crime would be a problem. It’s a nice, safe area on the edge of the city,” Taraval-area candy shop owner Diane Zogaric told The Post. “But that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”
The city’s “doom loop” downtown has caused half of retailers to flee the area, citing crime and safety concerns, with progressive policies on criminal justice widely blamed for the exodus.
This week Macy’s became the latest retailer to call it quits, saying it will close its giant Union Square department store.
But in residential areas, shop owners told The Post they fear for their future.
Chinese restaurant owner Andy Yang said: “We can’t just pack up and leave. We spent decades of our youth building and cultivating our businesses. We have families here. We have properties here.”
‘It shouldn’t be dangerous to work in a candy store.’
Diana Zogaric never imagined that she was making herself a target of crime when she bought the candy store her children had loved when they were young in 2020. But she’s since been robbed and violently assaulted.
Zogaric, 53, took over Shaw’s Candy, a local favorite in the West Portal, when it came up for sale in August of 2020.
The first major crime was in March 2023, when her front door was smashed at 5AM and a robber strolled in to grab her cash box containing $600, costing $1,500 in repairs. It was a forewarning of the sharp crime rise in the police district of Taraval, of which West Port is a par.
“The police who responded were great, but I don’t think that they prioritize crimes of that nature,” Zogaric said.
Then in September of 2023, when Zogaric asked a homeless man bothering customers outside her store to leave, he shoved her in the chest, causing her to stumble backwards. “He proceeded to punch me numerous times in the head, and all the while I was backing away, he kept punching me,” she said.
He forced his way into the store, punched the manager in the face, and pushed an elderly woman customer. Four male bystanders managed to restrain him until the cops came.
The man is now being detained in a mental facility for two years after getting a schizophrenia diagnosis, and a restraining order will prevent him coming into the store when he is released, but she remains shaken.
“I find myself recoiling on the streets,” she said. “I kind of just wanna leave San Francisco.”
“The biggest fear for me now is for my employees. As awful as what happened to me was, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if that happened to a teenager,” she said.
Zogaric cannot let employees work alone for fear of their safety, and the city’s $18.07 minimum wage means her margins are stretched thin.
“It should not be dangerous to work in a candy store. But, here, it is.”
“I’m pretty left wing,” Zogaric said. “But I still think criminals need to be prosecuted. There’s no fear because crimes aren’t being taken seriously in San Francisco.”
‘The stress gave me a heart attack’
Andy Yang’s Chinese joint Kung Food in the Park police district has been battered by vandals and burglars seven times since the pandemic.
The 35-year-old says the stress was so bad that he had an unexpected heart attack in December at the gym and is now recovering from bypass surgery.
“I’m just trying to keep my head out of the water,” the father of two, aged 4 and 18 months, told The Post. “I’m living in constant fear as a small business owner in San Francisco.”
“All the money that I’ve lost has just taken a toll on my life and my health,” he said.
“It’s the crime, it’s the vandalism, it’s the theft, it’s the beggars harassing customers. You can’t run a business like that, and I think I just collapsed under the stress of it all.”
Yang’s restaurant, in the North of the Panhandle neighborhood, has been broken into once every six months since 2020, costing him $15,000 in repairs, $3,000 in looted cash, and untold amounts in stolen food.
He used to leave takeout orders on his front table, but thieves snatched hundreds of dollars worth of food at a time. Once a waitress chased someone who stole takeout and got punched in the face.
“The restaurant business itself is a very thin margin business — especially with inflation — so all of this affects us tremendously,” he said.
Even though he pays $10,000 a year for insurance, his claims have never reached his deductible, leaving him to pay out of pocket and to stop filing entirely.
Throughout his string of burglaries, Yang contacted local city officials for support but says all he got in return was “some patronizing BS from like an intern.”
“I don’t blame the police for not doing their jobs. Their hands are tied,” he said.
Out of five burglaries, two perpetrators were caught by police, but, when he showed up to court, he learned that the district attorney had dropped the case.
Although crime is down this year in the Park district, he says, “If the rates are down here, I don’t feel any less miserable.”
Yang has posted about crime on social media and been sent nasty messages telling him to just leave San Francisco.
As crime continues to rage on, Yang says it’s important for the Chinese American community in San Francisco to speak up for themselves.
“Every small business owner I know is frustrated,” he said. “Everyone has an exit plan. Everyone is praying for Jesus to come to save us because clearly the elected officials aren’t going to.”
‘This is not the city I grew up in’
Michael Hsu, a 35-year-old San Francisco native, was thrilled when he bought his shoe store, Footprint, from his retiring boss in early 2020. But, when he took over the shop in the Sunset neighborhood, part of the Traval police district, things instantly fell apart.
“Two weeks later, we had to close because of Covid-19,” he said.
When Louis Vuitton was looted in San Francisco’s Union Square that June, Hsu knew he had to board up his business to protect his merchandise, so he shelled out $2,500 for in-demand plywood and depended on online business for more than seven months.
But, when he finally re-opened in 2021, he was barraged by crime like he’d never seen before: three major break-ins and repeated shoplifting which cost him around $50,000 in losses but resulted in zero arrests.
In 2021, burglars used a blowtorch to bypass the sensor which would alert him to broken glass and got away with over $25,000 in merchandise — a brutal toll considering his average sale is $100.
“It’s a lot of shoes we have to sell to make that up,” he said. “This isn’t Target or Nordstrom. This is a family business they’re stealing from.”
Later that year a thief, dubbed the Butt Crack Bandit, scaled scaffolding to get into his shop and got away with around $10,000 in shoes.
“It’s hard to sleep peacefully at night because you’re always wondering when the next call from the alarm company or the police is going to come,” Hsu, who relies on Footprint to support his 3-year-old daughter, told The Post. “The bottom line is we’re in San Francisco, so you have to be ready for anything.”
Even though he’s had to pay $1,500 each time his glass door was broken, it was below his insurance’s $2,000 deductible.
Then his insurers dropped him this month for filing too many claims — forcing him to pay 40% more to another insurer.
It can take a few weeks to get the glass he needs to repair his storefront, so now he orders two at a time, preparing for the next break-in.
“You can walk into a store and just walk out with anything, and there’s little that’s going to happen to you,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve thieves bashed in his windows and caused $20,000 in losses and repairs.
Even though the police arrived in under five minutes, the perpetrators got away — because, thanks to a local rule, the police aren’t able to pursue perpetrators of property crime if nobody is in harm’s way.
“That’s when I called the mayor’s office and said, ‘You gotta be kidding me. Watch this video. It doesn’t look good on you. It doesn’t look good on San Francisco. Let’s change this.”
Mayor Breed is now backing Proposition E, a ballot initiative that would allow police to pursue perps of property crime, like those who robbed Hsu.
“I don’t like to talk s–t about my city,” he said. “I love San Francisco. That’s why I want to work with policymakers — because we can do better, we’re better than this. We have to take back our city.”
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Rikki Schlott
