The air outside the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall smelled like pot when Chuck Mahone and his girlfriend took a walking tour of downtown in late May. The streets were dirty. Homeless people used drugs openly and relieved themselves under blankets.

Inside, unruly teens roamed the mall — Mahone wondered where their parents were. Retail staffers were so focused on security that they had little time for real customers.

"Ugh. Westfield should be shuttered," Mahone wrote in a Google review. "It's time as an energetic center of fine retail in SF is long passed. Dated, understaffed. A haven for homeless and disruptive youth."

This isn't the way Mahone remembers the mall and the surrounding area.

Mahone, who lives in Cincinnati, summered in San Francisco when he was younger, and the nine-story mall with its elegant spiral escalators and upscale shops was always a popular destination. "It was very vibrant. It was very safe. It was a very welcoming kind of urban environment," Mahone said.

His experience last month was anything but. "Not San Francisco's finest hour," Mahone said of his most recent visit downtown.

Mahone's experience at the mall was not unique. A National Review analysis of San Francisco Department of Emergency Management data shows that crime and disorder in and around the mall have been a consistent and growing problem. Over just the last three years, authorities have been called to the mall more than 5,000 times for a variety of reasons, from shoplifting and purse-snatchings to reports of assaults, people with knives and guns, mentally disturbed people in crisis, and indecent exposure.

The data show that reports of thefts are an almost daily occurrence at the mall. Fights are common, and there have been dozens of reported burglaries.

On average, there are more than five calls for service to the mall every day. And calls to the mall are increasing as the disorder downtown worsens.

A few weeks before Mahone's visit, Nordstrom announced it was shuttering its Westfield Centre store, a long-time anchor of the mall, along with a Nordstrom Rack store nearby.

In an email to employees, a Nordstrom executive danced around the reasons, citing the changing "dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market."

The owner of the mall, a Paris-based multinational real-estate firm, was more blunt: Rising crime and deteriorating downtown conditions are driving tourists, shoppers, and businesses away. “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area,” a mall spokesman said in May.

A little over a month later, the mall's owner announced that it had ceased making payments on its $558 million loan and that it, too, was leaving the city.

The data obtained by National Review show that the mall is increasingly dealing with the same day-to-day degradation and lawlessness that has plagued downtown San Francisco generally. Online reviewers have called the mall a "No-go" and complained about "rampant theft," shuttered restrooms, and "so much homeless and poverty" outside that you "need to look over your shoulder all the time."

Last month, Abimael Garcia, who manages the mall's janitors, told the San Francisco Standard that his workers are increasingly finding human waste in the elevators, in part because the restrooms are often closed due to sanitation issues and drug use.

"It's like twice a week now. It used to be once a month," he told the online outlet.

Attempts to reach Westfield corporate leaders for comment were unsuccessful. When reached on the phone, the mall's general manager declined to comment for this story. Security staffers reached on the phone also declined to comment.

"I think there are obviously safety concerns at the Westfield mall . . . as evidenced by the number of calls for service," said Matt Dorsey, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who is proposing a charter amendment to mandate increased police staffing.

He told National Review that the uncertainty swirling around the Westfield mall is the result of a "convergence of a lot of things," including changing retail patterns related to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the "addiction-driven lawlessness" that has been driving residents, office workers, shoppers, and tourists away from downtown.

"In a city like San Francisco the chickens come to roost in terms of fewer conventions wanting to come here, fewer people wanting to shop here, fewer workers wanting to come back to the office," Dorsey said. "Street conditions and safety are a factor in people not wanting to commute downtown."

Shoplifting, Fights, and Broken Windows

Opened in 1988 as the San Francisco Shopping Centre, the Westfield mall was for decades a jewel in San Francisco's posh downtown retail scene. It was once one of the top-performing shopping malls in the nation.

But the property has fallen victim to the same post-Covid disorder that has become common in the progressive city. The Department of Emergency Management data show the quickening drip, drip, drip of crimes and disturbances that have helped to drive businesses and customers from the mall and the surrounding area.

According to the data, which National Review obtained via a public-records request, emergency responders received 5,049 calls for service at or around the Westfield mall from May 19, 2020, to May 3, 2023 — an average of more than five calls per day in the roughly three-year period.

Many of the calls were for seemingly minor things — officers were called to more than 300 alarms, there were more than 800 calls requesting officers to pass through the area to increase their presence, there were hundreds of calls involving administrative duties, and there were handfuls of calls for things like parking violations and people lying on the sidewalk. But many of the calls involved more serious crimes and allegations.

During the three-year period, there were 452 petty-theft calls, 140 grand-theft calls, and 293 calls for "citizen holding a prisoner" — a particularly menacing-sounding term that usually means that a loss-prevention officer is detaining a suspected shoplifter.

Police were also called to more than 170 reported fights, 99 reports of assault or battery, 68 reported burglaries, 51 calls of a mentally disturbed person in crisis, and eight reported cases of indecent exposure.

Authorities were called to 26 reports of a person with a knife, 13 calls of a person with a gun, 17 strong-arm robberies, and three reports of shots fired, the data show.

Not all of the calls panned out — some could not be substantiated, some were canceled before officers arrived, and in some cases the suspects fled — but many of them did.

And the calls for service are increasing. There were 1,902 calls last year, up from 1,596 in 2021. Data from before May 2020 was not available.

This year, San Francisco authorities are on pace to receive more than 2,700 calls for service in and around the mall, the data show.

Authorities received 265 calls for service in February, 243 in March, and 247 in April — three of the top four busiest months for calls to the mall during the three-year period. In October, authorities received 317 calls for service to the mall, the busiest recent month.

To get a better sense of what mall employees and customers are experiencing, National Review obtained San Francisco Police Department case summaries of incidents at and around the mall from the last week of April. Most involved theft and shoplifting.

On the last Wednesday in April, about a week before Nordstrom announced it was leaving, a man shoplifting from the mall pulled a knife on a store employee who was pursuing him. The summary did not name the store the man was stealing from.

Two days later, on Friday, a man assaulted a store employee who tried to stop him from stealing. Again, the name of the store was not released.

On the last Saturday in April, San Francisco police officers were called to the mall for a fight, they tangled with a 27-year-old trespasser who refused to leave, they arrested two men accused of assaulting a woman outside, and they arrested a 45-year-old man who was breaking store windows in the area, according to the case summaries.

Dorsey, with the Board of Supervisors, said that when Whole Foods closed its downtown store in April, it was "directly and 100% attributable with retail theft and addiction-driven behavioral health issues where there was a real safety concern.” The mall's predicament, on the other hand, is the result of a variety of overlapping issues, including changing shopping habits and the pandemic.

"While we can acknowledge there are other factors at work that are contributing to business closures," he said, "we have to be honest that there are public safety and street-cleanliness concerns that are factors within our control, and our city has to do a better job of solving those problems."

'Simply Too Dangerous'

While big cities across the country were pummeled by the Covid-19 pandemic, no city seems to have been hit harder, or recovered more slowly, than San Francisco.

At the outset of the pandemic, tech workers stopped coming to downtown offices and tourists stayed away, ceding the streets and sidewalks to vagrants in the grips of addiction and mental illness. Homeless camps flourished. Thieves and drug users faced few repercussions from progressive-minded criminal-justice leaders who were determined to keep them out of jail.

Retail workers stopped reporting thefts to police, knowing that nothing was likely to happen. In March, CNN crew members had the back window of their rental car smashed and their bags stolen while they were at city hall reporting on rising crime. Last week, a Good Morning America reporter in San Francisco who went to cover the Westfield mall announcement was advised not to do an early-morning live-shot outside the mall because "it is simply too dangerous to be there at this hour."

The crime and vagrancy has kept workers and tourists away, leading to concerns that San Francisco could be in an endless "doom loop."

Nordstrom and the firm that owns the Westland mall are not alone in their decision to flee downtown San Francisco. More than two dozen stores have either closed or announced their intention to close in recent years, including: Whole Foods, Banana Republic, Saks Off Fifth, Office Depot, the Disney Store, AT&T, and several Amazon Go, CVS, and Walgreens stores.

In early June, the owner of two of San Francisco's largest downtown hotels announced it was stopping mortgage payments and going into foreclosure on its properties to reduce its exposure to the troubled city.

Elon Musk tweeted recently that downtown San Francisco feels "post-apocalyptic."

The progressive city's permissive attitude toward drug use and decisions by leaders to prioritize free housing over shelter and treatment has helped to turn San Francisco into a magnet for criminals, addicts, and the mentally ill. At the same time, the city's land-use policies and building fees — along with a general lack of space — have made San Francisco one of the hardest cities in the world for constructing new housing.

Ricci Wynne, a former San Francisco drug dealer who is now an activist calling for reform in the city, said the situation downtown is getting worse.

"The more department stores and other places that close down, the more the ones still remaining become targets of theft, loitering, drug use, and overall unsafe condition," he said.

One recent news analysis showed that San Francisco is last among 63 large American cities in regard to the return of post-pandemic activity downtown. The analysis of cell-phone data showed that activity in downtown San Francisco is only at 29 percent of its 2019 level, according to a report by the San Francisco's ABC affiliate this month.

Wynne agreed that there is no one cause of the downtown disorder. He pointed at Proposition 47, passed by voters in 2014, which decreased penalties for several nonviolent offenses, including drug use and theft. Under the law, criminals caught stealing items worth less than $950 face only a misdemeanor.

Dorsey suggested that Prop 47 could be amended so that repeat offenders face greater consequences. Pandemic-era efforts to help the homeless also had the unintended effect of encouraging more homelessness downtown, Wynne said.

"They were giving out free hotel rooms, giving out all of these things [to homeless people]," he said. "In essence, what that did is it made more people flock here, and then when they got here they realized they could steal things."

Dorsey also pointed at what he described as a "particularly acute police-staffing crisis" in the city. "We should have close to 2,200 police officers, and right now we've got about 1,500 and change," he said. It's a national "crisis that everybody saw coming" since a large cohort of police officers hired in the 1990s is reaching retirement age.

"I think if we have a fully staffed police department, then we will have people arrested for engaging in retail theft," Dorsey said. "When you have a chronically understaffed police department in a city that's getting 80,000 911 calls that are Priority A calls, you don't have the luxury of policing things like public drug use, street-level drug dealing, or retail theft."

'It Was a Wonderful Place to Go'

Inside the Westfield mall, almost half of the retailers and food-court vendors that were operating at the beginning of the pandemic have also left. The mall's Cinemark movie theater is shuttering this week, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sandra Green, a Bay Area resident who grew up shopping with her mom downtown, said she was last at the mall earlier this year. She called it "eerie."

"It's sad that everybody's leaving. It was a wonderful place to go," she said.

"My mom would take us down there all the time," Green said of downtown. "I never felt scared or I had to worry about some of the stuff that's going on now."

While shopping malls, a fixture of 1980s retail and culture, have struggled for decades, Westfield's owner said the San Francisco mall's performance is an outlier in its portfolio.

While sales at Westfield Centre in San Francisco have dropped from $455 million in 2019 to $298 million last year, sales are up 66 percent at Westfield Valley Fair in nearby San Jose, and sales are up over 20 percent at the company's other flagship stores.

Foot traffic at the San Francisco mall has dropped about 43 percent, from 9.7 million visits in 2019 to 5.6 million last year.

In response to Westfield's announcement that it is pulling out of the city, Mayor London Breed said the news was "something that has been coming for some time." She was seemingly critical of the owners, saying "they did not have a long-term commitment to San Francisco."

"With new management, we will have an opportunity to pursue a new vision for this space that focuses on what the future of Downtown San Francisco can be," she said.

"The public safety resources we've dedicated to the area, including ambassadors and police officers, remain in place," she added. "The stores are still part of our Downtown experience and we will continue to support this area to make it clean, safe, and inviting for everyone."

Mahon admits that his review calling for the mall to be shuttered was an emotional reaction. But if it is to return to its former glory, downtown San Francisco needs a dose of “good old-fashioned city governance,” he said. City leaders, he said, need to clean up the streets, work harder at getting troubled people the services they need, and make the area "accessible to people who have the economic means to support downtown."

"I think there's plenty of people who really are happy to go spend money and enjoy the architecture and the urban experience, and retail, and dining, and drinking," he said. "I think the governance piece is missing."