For years, San Franciscans have watched the slow-motion collapse of retail accountability in this city. Shoplifters strolled through stores with garbage bags, casually filling them like they were doing a weekly haul, while employees stood by — not because they didn't care, but because they were told not to intervene. Corporate liability fears and a prosecutorial culture that treated retail theft like a parking ticket created a perfect storm of impunity.

So now security is pushing back physically, and videos are going viral. Is it ideal? No. In a functioning city with a functioning justice system, you wouldn't need a security guard to body-check someone over a cart full of stolen goods. You'd have prosecutors who actually file charges and a police force empowered to make arrests that stick. But we don't live in that city — at least not yet.

Let's be clear: nobody is advocating for vigilante justice or unnecessary force. But there's a difference between excessive aggression and a security guard doing what security guards are literally paid to do. The real scandal isn't that someone got tackled leaving Safeway with stolen merchandise — it's that we spent years watching theft happen in broad daylight while city leaders shrugged and called enforcement "inequitable."

The result of that hands-off approach? Closed stores. Reduced hours. Fewer grocery options in neighborhoods that needed them most. The people hurt worst by rampant retail theft were never the corporations — it was the residents who lost their local Safeway, Walgreens, or Target.

If security guards getting physical makes you uncomfortable, direct that energy where it belongs: at a city government that let things deteriorate to the point where this became the only functional deterrent. Fund the cops, back the prosecutors, and let the justice system do its job — so grocery store security guards don't have to.