As mentioned yesterday, Target is closing nine stores... in blue cities, in blue states.

The Kobeissi Letter
@KobeissiLetter

BREAKING: Target, $TGT, to close 9 stores in major cities across the US due to "violence and theft."

This includes one of Target's New York City locations and 3 stores in San Francisco.

Target said in a statement that the safety of their team and guests are at risk, forcing closures.

This comes after target said that theft is costing them more than $500 million this year.

Walmart has also been contemplating shutting stores and raising prices due to theft.

As inflation persists, theft is getting worse.

Oakland business owners shut down their stores yesterday and went on strike to protest out of control crime.

There was yet another mass-looting in Philadelphia just because it's Tuesday and you know, there's nothing really on on Tuesday nights.

Hot Air, quoting garbage site CNN:

More than a dozen people were arrested after stores were looted when a large crowd gathered in Philadelphia's Center City district Tuesday night, police said.

The looting began shortly after the conclusion of peaceful protests against a judge's decision to dismiss all charges against a former Philadelphia police officer, Mark Dial, in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry on August 14, authorities said. The city's police commissioner said he believes the looters were "opportunists" that were not directly connected to the protests. ...

Police started getting calls around 8 p.m. from businesses reporting they were being broken into or getting ransacked, Stanford said.

The protest over the Irizarry case ended around 7:30 p.m., and though the police department had begun moving officers out of the area, enough were around to respond quickly when 911 calls about break-ins began, Stanford said.

Even San Francisco's woke Mayor is tired of homeless tent cities.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has sensationally blasted homeless activists in the city, complaining they are keeping people on the streets and enabling them.

She claimed advocates get in the way of city workers and discourage those most in need from going into shelters and getting help.

"These activists are the same people who hand out tents to keep people on the street instead of working to bring them indoors, as we are trying to do," Breed wrote on the online platform Medium.

"And they are the same people instructing and encouraging people to refuse shelter -- to remain on the street instead of going indoors. Their agenda is clear."

For the past year, San Francisco has been embroiled in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness, which claimed the city violated state and federal laws by clearing encampments and destroying belongings of the homeless without offering shelter.

John Sexton elaborates about that last part: Progressive cities are in federal court asking conservative justices to please allow them to clear homeless tent cities.

Specifically, they want judges to set aside a Ninth Circuit (aka "Ninth Circus" ruling) that you cannot clear homeless from makeshift tent cities unless you can offer each and every one of them alternate housing.

In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was elected on a platform of cleaning up the streets. She began removing tent camps around the city (which homeless activists all sweeps). The ACLU sued the city and the day before Christmas Eve a judge ruled the city could not do any more sweeps. Mayor Breed was clearly frustrated, saying at the time "Mayors cannot run cities this way."

So the outcome of the Boise decision is that cities on the west coast cannot remove tents from sidewalks unless they have a bed to offer every person being removed. In fact, thanks to the ACLU lawsuit, the status quo now is that San Francisco can't do anything unless it has enough beds for every homeless person in the city. Mayor Breed decided to appeal that case to the 9th Circuit, knowing she would probably lose but then expecting to be able to appeal that loss to the Supreme Court.

And Mayor Breed isn't alone. As the NY Times reports, both progressives and conservatives impacted by the Boise decision are begging the Supreme Court to overturn another ruling out of Grants Pass, Oregon which extended the Boise decision to not just cover criminal cases stemming from homelessness but civil penalties as well.

In a surge of legal briefs this week, frustrated leaders from across the political spectrum, including the liberal governor of California and right-wing state legislators in Arizona, charged that homeless encampments were turning their public spaces into pits of squalor, and asked the Supreme Court to revisit lower court decisions that they say have hobbled their ability to bring these camps under control...

"The friction in many communities affected by homelessness is at a breaking point," the attorneys for Las Vegas, Seattle and more than a dozen other cities, as well as national municipal organizations, wrote in one brief. "Despite massive infusions of public resources, businesses and residents are suffering the increasingly negative effects of long-term urban camping."...

"It's just gone too far," Mr. Newsom said in a Sacramento forum held by Politico this month, in which he vowed to seek clarity from the Supreme Court and recognized that he was asking for help from the same conservative jurists whom he had sharply rebuked for decisions on abortion and gun regulations.

"People's lives are at risk," he said. "It's unacceptable, what's happening on streets and sidewalks."

Chicago's wealthier northern suburbs were just hit by nine armed robberies and home invasions during a single hour of mayhem.

Currently, there have been 14,886 reports of theft in the city, and a further 21,160 cases of vehicle theft this year alone.

The number of motor vehicle thefts is up 86% on last year already, which had 11,403 cases for the year.

Despite the rising crime figures, newly appointed Mayor Brandon Johnson has been proposing mansion taxes on sales of homes more than $1 million.

And now, via Nate the Lawyer (who I think we got to know during the coverage of the Rittenhouse trial), Chicago's woke mayor continues refusing to see the connection between letting criminals free to terrorize the populace and business owners fleeing his city.

He complains of "supermarket deserts" (again), where locals have no stores they can go to to buy food.

He doesn't see any connection between this lack of supermarkets and Chicago's tolerance for/encouragement of mass looting of stores and supermarkets

Don't worry, though: He's got a solution.

He wants the state to open its own supermarkets, with the taxpayers basically payng to keep the shelves stocked with goods for Democrat voters to loot.