A Shopkeeper's Experience of Crime

Photo by Sharon Hahn Darlin (CC BY 2.0)

Basma Totah and her husband George Totah own two corner store markets in San Francisco. This is their story of how crime is impacting their business and lives. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Briones Review: What's been going on with your markets in San Francisco?

Basma Totah: We have two markets here in the city, one in the Mission and the other in Lower Pacific Heights. Since the onset of the COVID pandemic, we’ve been dealing with way more crime and property damage. 

My parents bought the store in Lower Pacific Heights 30 years ago and then my husband and brother-in-law bought it from them 18 years ago. Things were pretty good there until COVID, when the City put homeless people in hotels nearby on Van Ness. Since then, they’ve been spreading out in that neighborhood and that store has been getting robbed or broken into at least four to six times a year. 

Already this year we've had three break-ins, two of them in one week. The first time, someone sprayed the corners of a glass pane with dry ice and the whole pane just kind of crumbled and fell. The alarm went off and we got notified on our phone but they were in and out in 45 seconds. We could see them on the surveillance cameras. They took cigarettes and bottles of alcohol and tried to break into the registers.

The second time, my brother-in-law went to open the store and saw that there was a ladder propped on the side of the building. At first, he thought nothing of it. He’s seen ladders at nearby construction sites and somebody must have taken one. Well, you know how some of San Francisco’s older buildings have those little windows up top, above the main windows? Whoever broke in this time must have been in the store before and noticed that the top shelf has the premium liquor, the bottles that sell for $80 to $300. They used the ladder to get high enough to break one of those top windows and take the expensive bottles. The motion sensors don’t go up that high, so the alarm didn’t go off and nobody knew until the next morning.

The third time, the following week, they just smashed a whole pane of glass on one side and grabbed bottles of alcohol and cartons and cartons of cigarettes. Once again, they were in and out in less than a minute. 

Briones Review: Does the alarm system help?

Basma Totah: We have an alarm with an app that tells us if there’s some kind of movement, something is going on. The neighbors sometimes alert us, too. But the problem is that the thieves are in and out so quickly that there’s nothing we can do. By the time we notice, it’s already done. 

 Briones Review: How about the surveillance cameras?

Basma Totah: The people breaking in have hoods on. You cannot see their faces. We file police reports, but what are they going to do about it? Nothing.  

Every time it happens we have to replace a glass panel – safety glass, two thousand dollars each. We board it up while we wait for the glass, and by the time we fix one, another is broken. There are two or three other liquor stores nearby that have been going through similar break-ins. It's crazy. 

Briones Review: How long have you been in San Francisco?

Basma Totah: I was born here at St. Luke’s Hospital. I lived on Potrero Hill until I was five and then my parents bought a house on Girard Street in the Portola neighborhood where my parents still live today. My brother is down the street and my sister is there, too.

I went to E. R. Taylor Elementary School and Philip and Sala Burton High School. Then I went to cosmetology school and was a full-time hairstylist at the age of 19. I married George 25 years ago and we bought the first store 24 years ago. 

Briones Review: Tell me about the store in the Mission location. What’s been going on there?

Basma Totah: We've taken a huge hit at our market during COVID because the business is mostly commuters coming and going to BART. We’ve lost over 50 percent of our business because everybody’s working from home. We refurbished the store and added DoorDash to try to bring back our income, but it’s hard when we’re constantly dealing with drama, including three incidents already in 2023.

The first time, they smashed the side window. Some guys were drunk and somebody overheard them saying they wanted to get food. Okay, well, that’s nice. We boarded up the window and replaced it a couple of weeks later. Another pane of glass, another two thousand dollars. 

Two days later, some guy comes in and is trying to steal beer and my husband kicks him out of the store and tells him not to come back. The guy is screaming: “I’m going to kill you.” He goes and sits on the stairs of the church across the street. He’s still yelling and screaming and then he grabs two bottles from a garbage bin and throws them at the store from across the street. 

The bottle hits the glass, but nothing happens. So George gets a broom and sweeps up all the broken glass from the two bottles and he’s amazed that the window glass seems to be fine. 

Well, half an hour later, he’s in the store ringing up a customer and there’s this popping sound that sounds like somebody shooting and the customer ducks down.

George calls the police station down the street and says that it sounds like somebody shot at the store. Seven police cars come and the police are looking around and just then the whole pane of glass crumbles and falls. So I guess it was from the delayed impact of the two bottles. George tells the story to the cops, but they can’t find the guy. Then I have to go in to help clean up and bring George the plywood that we took off two days ago when we fixed the other window.

Briones Review: What a story!

Basma Totah: Then, the following Saturday, George is in the store at about 9:30 in the morning and he hears a bunch of metal clinking. He’s wondering if somebody crashed into or hit something. 

At the entrance to the store right on the corner, we have an ATM machine, one of those standalone kinds secured to the store with a chain. George walks out and sees a small Porsche SUV with no license plates but tags from Elk Grove stopped at the red bus zone near the store. Some guy has jumped out of the car and has cut the chain with big metal cutters and now he’s rolling the ATM toward the car. People are walking by looking incredulous and somebody calls the police. After George yelled at them they fled the scene and left the ATM in the street.

George got pictures of the car to show the police. There were no plates, just dealer papers from the Elk Grove Porsche dealer. The police put out a bulletin to be on the lookout for this car because things like this usually happen in bunches. So it’s just been one thing after the other. 

Briones Review: Have you sought insurance reimbursement for all those broken windows?

Basma Totah: We have not because there’s a deductible and our rates will spike. We claim business losses on our taxes, but how many losses can we absorb? It’s nonstop. So I'm not sure how much longer we’re going to be hanging on to it or if we're going to have to let that one go. 

These stores are family-owned businesses. Their income supports our lives. We’re putting two kids through college right now. My brother-in-law who owns the stores with us has two boys in college, too. These stores pay our bills. 

They’re also a lot of work. The store is open 7 to 10 Monday through Thursday, 7 to 11 Friday and Saturday and from 8 to 9 on Sunday. It’s nonstop. We have a worker who comes in five or six days a week, but my husband George is there almost all of the time. My son, a full-time college student, comes by and he helps manage the DoorDash and inventory. 

But there’s just been so much drama, so many break-ins and vandalism, and people trying to steal stuff. They know they’re not going to get arrested. They know it has to be over a thousand dollars to press charges.

Briones Review: How often do people try to steal from that store?

Basma Totah: All the time. People are always shoving beer and liquor into their jackets, pants, and backpacks. But since the situation with the guy throwing glass bottles from across the street and shattering the glass, George is trying to not scream and yell at them anymore. We don't need somebody to come back and shoot him or beat him up or smash up the whole store once we close or something. 

But there’s still somebody in there stealing something at least two, three times a week.

It’s pretty rough.

Briones Review: Do you get that much crime at the Lower Pacific Heights location?

Basma Totah: There’s a little less drama over there. My sister-in-law handles things pretty well. If she sees that you’re homeless, she will give you food. But if you come in screaming and acting crazy and knocking things over, she’ll yell at you and kick you out. But that store is also getting robbed or broken into at least four to six times a year. 

Last year a guy got in through the back yard, climbed through the kitchen window, and went into the store. He had a crowbar and tried unsuccessfully to open the ATM machine. Then he managed to open the cash register, but the money box was locked. He was smashing it with the crowbar and jumping on it, but he couldn’t get it open. Then he got tired, and he was too exhausted to get back out. So he got a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and just sat there eating ice cream. The video was hilarious. 

Briones Review: And then what happened? 

Basma Totah: He rested up and figured out how to get out.

Briones Review: Nobody noticed this was happening?

Basma Totah: The neighbors above said that they heard some banging, but they couldn't tell where it was coming from and there were no lights on in the store. 

Earlier last year somebody had broken in and stole a lottery display unit – the whole thing, with all the lottery tickets. Now, every one of those lottery tickets are numbered. They can track it if it’s stolen. Anyway, they carried the whole case out of the store, and I guess they got tired or didn’t know what to do with it because one of our neighbors was walking their dog and found it in the street and brought it back to the store. 

We’ve talked to the building management many times and told them that this isn’t working out and that we need metal gates or something on the outside of the stores. Well, they’re concerned that it doesn't look very appealing. And that it doesn’t look really nice and that it would just give a different kind of vibe or feel to this beautiful area.

So we’ve yet to figure out some kind of solution between what they’re saying and what we need and who's going to come up with the expense for it as well. You still have a lot of different people coming into that neighborhood that never did before, who are sleeping in doorways and shooting up drugs. You notice it when they come in, they’re a little off. 

These people living in the streets have nowhere to go. You see all the usage of drugs out in the public. You see people defecating on the streets. It’s filthy. What the hell is going on? I just don’t understand. I feel bad for San Francisco. I really do.