Over the last few months, we’ve seen quite a lot of gear theft in San Francisco. Thanks to ABC 7 News, one of the locations where stolen gear ends up has been found and identified.
Reporter Dan Noyes spoke to a San Francisco man who revealed that many of the stolen goods are sold in the street, often hours after the theft. One of the locations for these transactions is an open-air market at Garfield Square in the Mission District, and it’s all happening in broad daylight!
It all started when Dan Noyes shared a tweet earlier this month, asking anyone with a video or photo of car break-ins to share them. As he says in his report, the tweet quickly got quite a lot of replies.
Working on the issue of car break-ins and stolen goods in San Francisco. DM me if you have video or photos to contribute to the report. This has to stop.
— Dan Noyes (@dannoyes) April 6, 2022
One of the people who reached out to Noyes captured quite a lot of the exchanges on camera. The man, who wishes to stay anonymous, captured the street sale of stolen items for over a year now, and he says that he just wants it to stop. According to him, all this happens in broad daylight, often when kids are playing soccer just feet away.
This didn’t end only with photo and video proof. The man says that he wrote “an extensive, detailed email to the San Francisco Police Department” about the illegal sales. It was last September when he reportedly received a call from an investigator about the case, but that was it.
“Did you see any crackdown? Did the police do something that you could see?” Noyes asked. The man responded that nothing has been done yet, at least to his knowledge. “Given how blatant and brazen it is, it’s alarming that it would take this long to do something about it,” he concluded.
Noyes spoke with Hillary Ronen, a supervisor for the Mission District. They asked if the police have been aggressive enough in addressing the issue like the resident who sees the open-air market for stolen goods. Ronen seemed a bit confused, but she responded: “No, I mean, no, they haven’t.”
The reporter also spoke to Captain Gavin McEachern of the Mission Police Station. He said that the aforementioned email of the concerned citizen came in before he took over. “Me, and being a police officer, I would have jumped all over that, we would have had, you know, we would have been on it,” he claimed. Still, nothing has changed, and ABC7 News reports that investigators are still working on the case.
We have covered numerous gear thefts here on DIYP, and a lot of them took place in San Francisco. Our buddy Jeff Graham got robbed while the camera was rolling, and he shared with us some San Francisco locations where it’s best not to take your gear. Earlier this year, a wedding photographer was assaulted in the middle of a couple shoot. And the most recent case shows a chilling couple of minutes of armed robbers grabbing the gear from the Canadian film crew’s car.
I’m not going to say that the police aren’t doing anything, because I don’t know, I’m not a San Francisco resident (although I could rant about Serbian police forever). But according to Noyes’s report, they could be doing a better job when it comes to preventing both the theft and then illegal sales of electronics. But, until that happens, take extra care of your gear and of yourself.
[EXCLUSIVE: San Francisco fencing operation video shows what happens after car break-ins via PetaPixel]
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