By Linda Badger

Although many people believe crime in San Francisco is over hyped, the City has earned its wild west reputation for car break-ins. Tourism, a major source of revenue for San Francisco, has suffered, slowing the City’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

One Richmond District resident decided to do something about it – one stolen, ransacked and discarded suitcase at a time.

Mark Dietrich has lived in the avenues near Geary Boulevard for many years. At the beginning of the pandemic, he noticed piles of stolen luggage with their contents strewn on the sidewalk outside his home. Thieves were breaking into cars at popular tourist destinations – like Fisherman’s Wharf, the Palace of Fine Arts and Crissy Field – then speeding down Park Presidio and turning into the Richmond District to dump what they could not easily fence. Smash-and-grabs were also taking place in Golden Gate Park and Lands End, resulting in bags being dumped throughout the neighborhood.

“As stolen luggage began appearing more and more frequently in our neighborhood, I simply could not stand still,” Dietrich said.

An ex-Eagle Scout and longtime community activist, he was angry and frustrated, “knowing that someone’s trip to San Francisco was ruined by criminals.”

Dietrich serves on the Richmond Station’s Community Police Advisory Board and knew that SFPD didn’t have the bandwidth to search through discarded luggage, so he put on his gloves and began sorting through the discarded possessions himself. He found that 80% of bags contain identification sufficient for him to contact the owners, including passports and business cards. If he only finds a name, he searches social media for contact information. Very occasionally, Dietrich resorts to taking unidentifiable luggage to the Richmond Police Station, hoping that the victim filed a police report. He claims a 90% success rate in returning stolen bags to their owners. By contrast, he estimates that 80-90% of all luggage returned to SFPD gets destroyed and/or donated.

According to Dietrich, thieves take cash and electronics, but dump everything else. Some items are difficult and/or expensive to replace. He has found prescription glasses, vital medications, mouth guards, house and car keys, and very often, passports. While passports make it easy to contact the bags’ owners, losing a passport can ruin a trip.

“Victims are always very happy to be reunited with their passports,” Dietrich said.

He frequently drops passports and luggage off at consulates to help reunite the items with the victimized tourists.

When Dietrich contacts victims, they are suspicious at first, and then grateful to have their possessions returned. He has returned a much-loved teddy bear to a 7-year-old, a family Bible, a hard drive containing five years of research, a “lucky” backpack that survived multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the equipment and supplies carried by a girls’ volleyball team.

Despite their gratitude, victimized tourists tell him “they are not coming back to San Francisco anytime soon, and that they are going to tell their friends and family not to come here.

“The City simply hasn’t done enough to curtail this crime,” Dietrich said. “Crime happens where cops are not, and we’re down 500-800 officers, so there simply aren’t the resources to fight this crime effectively.”

He also blames city officials for failing to aggressively prosecute perpetrators of smash-and-grab crimes.

For years, San Francisco has had the largest number of car break-ins of all large U.S. cities tracking this data, averaging 70 break-ins a day in 2015. For the year 2022, SFPD data showed 23,454 reports of “theft from vehicles” or approximately 64 car break-ins a day. In 2023, this number dropped by 16% to 19,742, or 54 break-ins a day. (The Richmond District had reports of 2,642 car break-ins in 2022, or seven break-ins a day, which fell about 10% in 2023 to 2,384.)

This downward trend is continuing. The latest SFPD crime statistics for the first quarter of this year show “theft from cars” decreased by 51% from the same period a year ago. Dietrich confirms this trend, reporting a “noticeable reduction in luggage dumps in the past year.” The City and SFPD have implemented deterrence measures, increasing police presence in tourist spots, and posting “park safe” signs warning people to leave nothing in their cars.

Additional law enforcement measures have been approved or are under consideration, which might reduce car break-ins. Proposition E, recently passed by city voters, will ease restrictions on SFPD’s ability to engage in vehicle pursuits to catch criminals, and will also allow the City to install public surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers to better identify perpetrators of this crime. Also, SB-905 is a proposed bill to close the “locked door loophole” in California law, which defines vehicle burglary as applying only to “locked” cars. This makes prosecution of smash-and-grabs hard, especially when the victims are tourists, unlikely to be around to testify that their car doors were locked when criminals broke-in. Finally, in November, voters will likely be asked to decide whether to amend Proposition 47, which reclassified most thefts under $950 as misdemeanors instead of felonies.

After posting about his efforts on Nextdoor, Dietrich learned that many Richmond residents had already successfully returned luggage to victimized tourists. If anyone wants to help, he suggests you always take pictures of the location where the luggage was dumped to use in corresponding with owners. Use a flashlight and wear gloves when searching for contact information and remember that time is of the essence. Most tourists are on the move and, according to Dietrich, likely to be leaving San Francisco within 12 hours. In one instance, a family was already on their way to Disneyland when Mark called. Coincidentally, he was driving to L.A. the next day, and met them outside Disneyland, making the happiest place on Earth even happier.

Car break-ins have harmed tourists as well as tourism for over a decade. While the City has been slow to fix this blight on San Francisco’s reputation, citizens like Dietrich have jumped in to help tourists and demonstrate that there are good people in San Francisco. Victimized tourists still may not leave their hearts in San Francisco, but they might keep a place in their hearts for San Franciscans.