Another brazen Walgreens shoplifting heist was captured on video Sunday, as burglars emptied the shelves of the Ninth and Market street store, but police did not respond to the incident until four hours later.

We’ve long wisecracked that the Civic Center Walgreens at Ninth and Market streets is “San Francisco's worst Walgreens.” Its reputation will not be helped by a Monday night KPIX report that this Walgreens was ransacked by shoplifters at about 4:30 pm on Easter Sunday afternoon. The plundering was captured on video, but what may be more newsworthy here is that SFPD did not respond until four hours after the incident.  

The KPIX report is seen above, and the video was taken by an unidentified KPIX producer who just happened to be shopping in the store. There are at least a half-dozen culprits, masked and concealing their faces with hoodies. They seem to be aware that they’re being recorded, though as is the case with many of these Walgreens thefts, there is no visible response or intervention by store security.

We understand that Walgreens security guards may have limited their hands-on engagement since last April’s Banko Brown shooting, but there is no visible security presence seen in this video.

"End of the day on Easter Sunday should have been pleasant,” the KPIX producer, who declined to give his name, told the station. “Instead I was shocked to see looters taking what they pleased with no regard for the law, or those around them, real-life smash and grab."

Another thing we may be shocked to see is that SFPD did not respond to the incident for four hours. KPIX did get an emailed statement about the incident from SFPD, which they paraphrase as saying “officers responded at about 8:38 p.m. to a report of a group of people stealing from a business on the 1300 block of Market Street.” So that’s about a solid four hours after the incident took place.

But KPIX also adds that “Officers arrived to find the business was closed and no one was there to report the incident.” Admittedly, we are missing the crucial piece of information of what time police were called. But this sure could feed into the “Police did nothing” narrative we’ve heard before.

That district’s supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former SF Police public relations rep who sees giving the police more money as the solution to every SF problem, says this sort of thing can be prevented if we hire more police officers.

"If we had a fully staffed police department, we could have a robbery unit that was doing more enforcement in places where retail theft plays out, holding more people accountable and doing more to go after the fencing operations that make this lucrative," Dorsey told KPIX.

That station estimates that 17 San Francisco Walgreens locations have closed since 2019, most recently in February in the Financial District. Though many of these closures were announced in 2019 after the chain had over-expanded, and it's debatable whether shoplifting played a major role in the closures.  

Related: Group of Suspects Ransacks and Robs Walgreens Store In Castro [SFist]

Image: Kevin Y. via Yelp