San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Matt Dorsey said Wednesday that the Whole Foods closure in the city was a "gut punch" to the whole neighborhood and added that he wasn't surprised.
"I believe we can do better as a city, but I will tell you the closure of whole foods after just a year of being open is a real gut punch for the neighborhood. And I wish I could say I was surprised, but I have seen a lot of the issues with people acting out and shoplifting. So fingers crossed, we can turn things around here and I do have some optimism, but hopefully we can get this supermarket back open because the neighborhood waited a long time for it," he told CNN.
"CNN This Morning" co-host Don Lemon asked Dorsey if he believed people have a misunderstanding about how dangerous of a city San Francisco is because it has "far fewer homicides than other similarly sized cities."
"Yeah, I do," Dorsey said. "I served for two years as a civilian member of the command staff of the police department and one of the things that I saw play out in terms of crime, in a time of COVID was, I think most major cities in the United States would trade their violent crime problem for our property crime problem and sort of public drug use problem in a heartbeat. That being said we’re a major city. We have violent crime, so I don’t want to diminish anybody’s sense of fear."
Dorsey tweeted on Monday that was "disappointed" by the closure but also "unsurprised."
"Our neighborhood waited a long time for this supermarket, but we’re also well aware of problems they’ve experienced with drug-related retail theft, adjacent drug markets, and the many safety issues related to them," he added.
CNN co-host Kaitlan Collins asked Dorsey how he might turn the city's crime problems around.
"We have a real police under-staffing crisis, this is a generational issue because there is a disproportionately large generational cohort of police officers hired during the Clinton administration, and right now they’re all reaching retirement age and we’re all going off a demographic cliff if we don’t do more and better to make sure that we’re hiring police officers," he said.
He added that he was proposing a charter amendment "to get to a fully staffed police department within no less than five years."
FORMER SAN FRANCISCO FIRE COMMISSIONER SLASHED AND BEATEN WITH PIPE DAYS AFTER BOB LEE STABBING
A Whole Foods spokesperson said in a statement on Monday, "We are closing our Trinity location only for the time being." The statement added, "If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location."
Critics blamed Democratic leadership following the announcement as some described it as a "failed city."
"San Francisco is a failed city. It cannot protect the safety of its residents, tourists, or businesses. Gov. @GavinNewsom needs to halt his presidential run and send in the national guard to shut down the dangerous and deadly open air drug markets," journalist and author Michael Shellenberger wrote on Twitter.
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Bob Lee, a 43-year-old tech innovator who founded Cash App, was stabbed to death earlier this month in San Francisco.
