Among the more than a dozen smash-and-grab robberies in the Bay Area in recent weeks, cannabis facilities may have been the hardest hit.
In San Francisco, at least four cannabis businesses have been robbed in the last two weeks, according to news reports. At least 20 have been hit in Oakland, where most of the Bay Area’s cannabis cultivation, manufacturing and distribution facilities are located.
“It’s proving to be unbearable for cannabis operators,” said Amber Senter at an Oakland press conference held by cannabis business owners on Monday. Senter owns multiple cannabis business licenses in San Francisco and Oakland, and is also executive director of the industry group Supernova Women. “We need more protection, and we need more funds and resources to improve security, so we can protect ourselves.”
Alarmingly, many of the robberies have turned violent. According to Senter, more than 175 shots were fired during recent cannabis robberies in Oakland this month alone — a figure she says she was given by the Oakland Police Department, though OPD did not responded to The Examiner’s requests for comment.
Many cannabis business owners say police, both in Oakland and San Francisco, are slow to act. They point to surveillance video made public last week in which police appear to calmly stand by and watch as three suspects steal trash bags full of product from the dispensary BASA, in the North of the Panhandle neighborhood of San Francisco.
Cannabis businesses are a tempting target in part because weed is illegal under federal law. That makes it difficult for business owners to work with banks, most of which operate under federal charters. As a result most cannabis businesses operate in cash, and have at least $10,000 or more in cash on hand. Further, stolen cannabis products are incredibly easy to resell on the unregulated market.
Senter also worries videos like that from BASA make it clear to criminals that cannabis businesses are a particularly easy target. “The police aren’t coming through, even though these people are coming through with guns, using those guns and firing hundreds of rounds. I don’t want to get shot, I don’t want my employees to get shot, and I don’t want my friends and colleagues to get shot.”
At the Monday press conference, owners were quick to point out the robberies come on top of what they consider excessive taxation on cannabis products. Taxes, they say, are supposed to pay for public services, like the police, and they don’t believe they’re getting what they pay for. In Oakland, cannabis businesses are taxed at least 6% on sales, while other retailers are taxed at 0.12%.
“We’re paying all this money for basic government services — 600 to 900 percent more in sales tax, depending on the amount of revenue you generate, than a typical Oakland business,” says Senter. “This means we should have basic protection, right? You would think. But we’re just not getting that.”
In San Francisco, a cannabis business tax which ranges from 1% to 5% dependent on gross receipts was already once delayed by the Board of Supervisors last year, due to what they considered an increased burden on small businesses amidst the pandemic. On Tuesday, supervisors passed another ordinance by Supervisor Rafael Mandelman of District 8 to suspend the imposition of the city’s Cannabis Business Tax again until Dec. 31, 2022.
The recent ordinance wasn’t originally intended to be a response to the rash of robberies. Rather, it was meant to encourage people to operate within the current regulated cannabis market.
High taxes, many believe, disincentivize illegal operators to join the legal market and customers from buying legal weed. A report by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, for example, found that increasing taxes by 10% would result in a 7 to 22% decrease in legal cannabis consumption.
However, suspending the tax coincidentally responds to the call from business owners to lower taxes in the wake of the robberies, which Mandelman now willingly acknowledges.
“Cannabis businesses, along with many other retailers in San Francisco, are struggling under the weight of out-of-control retail theft,” said Mandelman in a press release. Some cannabis dispensaries have switched to only selling online by getting Blaze cannabis software to avoid issues like this. San Francisco needs to do more to protect these businesses, their employees, and their customers before we hit them with a new tax.
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“Many cannabis business owners say police, both in Oakland and San Francisco, are slow to act”. Hey cannabis owners, you voted in these communists, who will not prosecute criminals and now you cannabis owners are being eaten alive by your own stupidity. In the end, when one worships liberalism, you cut your own throat. “Stupid is as stupid does”!
THEY get what they voted for.. SO I HAVE NOT One iota of sympathy for any of those dolts.
How do you change— change the U.S. from a capitalist system’,
Into a Socialistic Democrat Party government controlled system. ??
1. Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.
2. Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).
3. Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children and young people learn in schools and colleges.
4. Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
5. Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take from the wealthy and give to poor. Until there are only the poor.
6. Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level.
7. Gun Control — Remove the ability for the people to defend themselves from the Government. (“Socialist Democrat Party State”)
8. Poverty — Increase the poverty level as high as possible. Poor people are easier to control and will keep socialists in power if they are providing everything for them to live. Encourage, protect and support multi-millions of illegal immigrants who are poor, uneducated and disease ridden.
9. Allow illegal immigrants to vote and hold government positions.
Do these look like the tactics of the Democrat Party??
This traitorous, dishonorable, dishonest, immoral, socialist Democrat Party has become our country’s most destructive and deadliest ENEMY!
First comes the legalization of the mind-bending pot, that arouses the entitlement to other people’s property in social theft and removes the social restraints that prevent it, that in actual theft now attacks and removes the very products of the shops that sell their society destroying products who soon become the first to suffer the leftist wingnut acts of their own home-grown self-destruction. It’s called the Democrat secular Socialist circle of life, where what they produce in human mind indoctrination, returns to destroy those who first planted it in the minds of THE PEOPLE and grew it in their government subsidies and criminal intentions. The crime is that THE PEOPLE ever had to hear their deceptions in the first place, where our own American media becomes the enemy in their beguiling co-conspiracies of American mind manipulation in both words and drugs.
California Legislative Analyst’s Office, for example, found that increasing taxes by 10%
would result in a 7 to 22% decrease in legal cannabis consumption.
No problem.
Raise the taxes and people will just go back to buying their cannabis on the street.
OR STEALING IT… As this article shows.
Time for the Cannabis businesses to put up the bullet proof glass and place people with the shotguns in various places in the business. Or Place the sign ” Looters not Allowed” next to the sign “No Firearms Allowed” out in Front.
How’s about get RID OF THE No-firearms signs!