SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) – A community-led effort is helping San Francisco smash and grab victims to reunite with their stolen belongings.
With dozens of car break-ins happening daily in the city, neighbors in the Richmond District say a lot of the stolen luggage, backpacks, and other items end up being dumped in their neighborhood.
It’s through the power of social media, most of the time these neighbors are posting about the stolen luggage they’ve found and connected through the Nextdoor app.
One man who started this massive effort about a year ago says he’s already helped 50 tourists get their things back and most recently was able to help a group over the weekend.
First, it’s the shattered glass and then the littered luggage across the streets of San Francisco.
“From Park Presidio to about 20th Avenue is a place where we find them daily,” Mark Dietrich said.
Neighbors in the Richmond District, like Mark Dietrich, say scenes like this are becoming more common in the neighborhood after burglars break into cars at tourist spots like Fisherman’s Wharf and palace of fine arts, steal items and then dump the stolen suitcases.
“When they want to make a quick getaway, they jump on the Golden Gate Bridge and it spits them out into our neighborhood, and boom this is the first place where they can pull into a parking spot and dump it in someone’s driveway,” Dietrich said.
Dietrich says he’s found dozens of bags over the last year when he began tracking down victims to bring back their belongings. He says he’s already helped about 50 tourists.
“Sometimes it’s one backpack, a week or two ago, it was an entire college women’s volleyball team whose vans were smashed again at Land’s End and took all of their gear and equipment,” Dietrich said.
It’s also sentimental items like an Army veteran’s backpack.
Dietrich says a bag was stolen most recently while a group was visiting from Kentucky on Saturday.
He says one of the victims told him that the bag had survived two tours in Iraq, but couldn’t make it past two hours in San Francisco.
Dietrich eventually tracked down the backpack and was able to return it to the veteran.
Meanwhile, on Monday, another neighbor found this bag and posted about it on Nextdoor, a social media site where many in the city post about the recovered items.
“Somebody messaged me, “Hey I found a bag. I don’t know what to do with it.” So I zipped over there, got the bag. I mean the bags right here. I’ve gone through it and there’s no identification, absolutely nothing in it,” Dietrich said.
In these cases, Dietrich will turn it over to the police.
While this community effort isn’t stopping the thefts from happening, he says at least this is something anyone can do to help this growing problem.
“The least we can do as neighbors is help these poor tourists who come here on their vacations and we rob them, the least we can do when we’re walking down the street is at least scoop up the sidewalk of stolen luggage and figure out how to get it back to them,” Dietrich said.
This effort is something that many local networks in the city are now tapping into and banding together to return stolen items.
Beyond Nextdoor, sometimes you can also find neighbors posting about stolen items on Facebook or Twitter.