Basically all of the arguments this site makes are wrong, and the arguments that it says are wrong are all correct. Details:

> …Except that this causal attribution is not even plausibly correct.

> Though it’s tempting to frame the law as just another artefact of California’s bleeding-heart progressivism, similar laws are in fact present in all 50 states.

> You might object that other states have different financial thresholds for felonies… which would be a good counter argument except that California is actually on the low end. Every single US state has a minimum threshold for felony theft, and 38 of them are higher than California’s. Texas notably has a threshold of $2500, which means you can steal 2.6 more than you could in California before being classified as a felon. Talk about incentives! [1]

This argument is wrong because misdemeanor theft is treated way less seriously in California than in other states.

> It’s tricky, cases do fall, but most of that is pandemic effects. When compared to the state as a whole, adjacent counties saw relatively little decrease in shoplifting

This argument sounds like "if you were right, then the data would show X. Well, the data does show X, but that's because of other things. Therefore you're wrong."

> The problem with the “residents don’t bother reporting” view is that it’s simply too compelling. It allows us to ignore data, ignore nuanced argumentation, ignore even the semblance of rigour, all while taking the moral high ground of a “man on the street” aligned with the interests of “everyday people”.

An argument must be wrong because it's too good? And what about all the news stories of super brazen shoplifting in San Francisco?

> The 5 store closures are certainly notable, but taken in context, don’t suggest an extreme deviation from what we might expect.

Weasel words: The fact the author had to say "extreme" here means that they do suggest a deviation from what we might expect.

> Though some of the five stores with announced closures did see a substantial rise in shoplifting in 2020, SF Chronicle reports that the 2550 Ocean Ave. location reported a mere 3 cases throughout the entire year, similar to the 4 cases it reported in 2019. The 4645 Mission St. location reported a mere 3 cases of shoplifting in 2021 (the closure was announced in mid-October).

This is wrong because it's only counting the cases that the police came to take a report for.

> If you haven’t guessed, none of these are from San Francisco.

The author ignored all of the videos of this happening in San Francisco and cherry-picked the much rarer examples of it happening elsewhere.

> We had clear instructions [...] from the medical director to drastically reduce the (jail) population

The medical director isn't the district attorney's boss. This was still Chesa's decision in the end.

> I wasn’t able to find a similar source confirming that this is due to a change in reporting, but when asked about increased reports at the Target location, a police spokesperson confirmed that “the new reporting system was accessible to other businesses”, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if this Safeway adopted the new system in November.

When you found an outlier in your data, your default assumption shouldn't be to throw it out just because it might not be legitimate, especially when you looked for confirmation of such and couldn't find it.