On as many as six occasions this year, Mark Dietrich has seen the aftermath of apparent tourist-center theft strewn throughout his neighborhood in the Richmond District. After apparently making off with suitcases, thieves are fleeing populated tourist zones, preferring to sort out their hauls in the streets of quieter locales, Dietrich said.
Dietrich’s home security camera captured one such sorting session outside his home, where apparent thieves can be seen rifling through suitcases, extracting valuables and dumping the rest on the street.
“Now that the tourists are back, the break-ins are just more brazen,” said Dietrich, who has taken to picking up the discarded belongings, sifting through them and trying to reunite them with their owners.
Statistics from San Francisco police show that break-ins have risen sharply in tourist areas, particularly the San Francisco Police Department’s Central District — the northeastern corner of the city, home to seven of the city’s top tourist attractions, including Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown, according to a police website.
Last month, the Police Department’s Central Station saw a 753% increase in auto burglaries compared to the previous May. But that was the height of lockdown restrictions. They are up only 75% compared to 2019.
The number of break-ins also increased 94% between April and May of this year, tracking with the city’s gradual reopening from the pandemic.
Citywide, however, the number of thefts from cars remains lower compared with last year, when shelter-in-place restrictions pushed car break-ins to record lows.
The most recent data for the Central District, through June 6, shows that 2,048 cars were looted so far this year, compared with 858 through the same period of 2020 — an increase of nearly 139%. Park District, home to part of Golden Gate Park, saw about a 3% increase. Every other district is still below its 2020 year-to-date total.
Police are aware of the increases and focusing anti-break-in efforts on the Central District, said Officer Adam Lobsinger, a spokesperson for the department. The number of officers, including those on foot patrols, has been bumped as statistics show the surge in thefts from cars.
“We have the city reopening, we know people are coming back and we want them to have a good experience,” he said.
The apparent return of car break-ins targeting areas frequented by tourists threatens to harm the nascent comeback of the tourism industry, which evaporated during the pandemic. Hotel occupancy rates just started showing encouraging signs of an uptick in early May, said Kevin Carroll, executive director of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, with a noticeable bump on Memorial Day weekend. The Fourth of July is expected to be “the first big wave.”
“We want our visitors to feel safe and feel they can park safe,” Carroll said. “Anything that pulls away from that hurts their experience here. You come to visit this beautiful city and your car is broken into, it leaves a bad impression. We don’t want that to happen.”
It happened to Kinga Sojka, a real estate agent from St. Petersburg, Fla., at the end of her trip to the Wine Country and San Francisco with nine girlfriends in the middle of May. Sojka parked her rental car in a garage near Pier 39 and set out on foot to explore Lombard Street, Fisherman’s Wharf and the waterfront. Hours later, she returned to find the rear window smashed and her suitcase and a friend’s backpack, containing her keys from home, missing.
“It was pretty shocking,” she said, “because I don’t think of high crime in San Francisco, especially in a touristy area.”
Even a month later, Sojka repeatedly uses the word “shocked” to describe the experience: shocked that it could happen in a heavily traveled tourist spot, shocked that it could happen in the middle of the day, shocked that thieves “feel comfortable to be able to do this in the middle of the day.”
“It’s also so shocking how they basically dump it out on street in front of million-dollar homes and just leave it there if there’s nothing worth keeping,” she said.
After recovering from the shock of the break-in, Sojka and friends headed to San Francisco International Airport, where there was one more surprise. Ten minutes before boarding her flight, she got a call from Dietrich, who had found her belongings in the street. They arranged to have friends departing later pick them up.
Dietrich has posted on social media, mostly on the neighborhood networking site Nextdoor, urging people who find dumped luggage and belongings to gather them, try to find identifying information and contact their owners.
In addition to Sojka, he’s reunited visitors from New York, Reno and North Carolina with what remains of their belongings, which often include medications, passports and personal items like diaries. On a planned trip to Southern California, he even delivered luggage discarded by thieves to the North Carolina family, who had moved on to Anaheim.
“These travelers all had a miserable experience in SF,” he wrote on Nextdoor. “At the very least, we were able to make it a little bit brighter for them.”
Police and the Hotel Council advise tourists to leave nothing of value in their cars, even out of sight or for a short period of time, instead storing their luggage at hotels, even before or after their stays.
Sojka lost nothing of value, just some clothing and cosmetics, she said, and she says she’ll return to San Francisco — “I love the city.”
But she has advice for visitors: Travel light.
“Just don’t take valuable stuff with you. Take as little as possible and nothing of big value — no laptops, no jewelry — don’t bring it at all and if you do bring it, even a passport or car keys, carry it with you. Don’t leave it in your car.”
Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @ctuan
