With the abrupt closure of yet another drugstore in downtown San Francisco due to rampant theft, the question of why store security guards aren’t allowed to use force has arisen anew. It’s apparent that force is the only way to deter shoplifters, and yet these guards are not permitted to use it. In fact, they’re not even allowed to interfere with thieves, which makes me wonder why stores bother to hire them in the first place. In San Francisco, the issue of security guards reached new urgency after the shoplifter, Banko Brown, was shot and killed by a Walgreens security guard.

I chatted up a paid signature gatherer yesterday (he didn’t know who I was). When I asked how things were going, he said great; people are eager to sign. I remarked that getting 100,000 signatures seems like an uphill battle and he replied, “Oh, no, not for professional signature gatherers. We’ll have that by the end of this month.” That sounds optimistic, but I liked his confidence.

Did you happen to catch video of Thao giving her State of the City speech the other day? She reminded me of Shirley Temple, the pudgy child actress of the 1930s, in a movie about a little girl who pretends to be a Queen.

It’s taken a while, but I finally got the blank petition forms from Carl Chan, and can now distribute them to everyone who signed up to gather signatures for the Recall of Pamela Price.

Naturally, the left is against “pretext stops.” A high-level OPD officer defines pretext stops as a term “mainly [used] by the anti-police groups suggesting that cops stop folks for a low level ‘minor’ reason as a ruse to stop someone who[m] police are investigating for something else.” In addition to no license plate, these reasons can include expired registration tags, a driver blowing through a stop sign, or a car with broken tail lights.