SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Target says it's closing all five of its San Francisco stores early because of crime specifically thefts and shoplifting.

All the stores in the city are now operating from 9 a.m. until just 6 p.m.

The company says that for more than a month their stores have experienced an alarming rise in theft and security incidents.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed says cutting hours is not the answer.

The number of Americans seeing crime as an extremely serious problem in the United States is at a more than 20-year high, President Joe Biden is underwater in trust to handle it and broad majorities in an ABC News/Washington Post poll favor alternative crime-fighting strategies to address it.

A sweeping 75% in the national survey said violent crime would be reduced by increasing funding to build economic opportunities in poor communities. Sixty-five percent said the same about using social workers to help police defuse situations with people having emotional problems.

These measures, aimed at underlying causes of crime, are most apt to have been seen as effective, by substantial margins, of five that were tested. Among the others, 55% think increasing funding for police departments would reduce violent crime, 51% say the same about stricter enforcement of existing gun laws and 46% say so about stricter gun-control laws.

Broad support for alternative anti-crime measures comes against a backdrop of heightened high-level concern. Twenty-eight percent of Americans see crime in the United States as an extremely serious problem, a relatively small group but the most to hold this view compared to nearly annual polls by Gallup from 2000 to 2020. The average across those previous polls is 19%.

America is exhausted. We’ve gone through the worst presidency in our history, when the very concept of what it meant to be an American was challenged. A pandemic has killed over 600,000 of our fellow Americans, more than we lost in both world wars of the last century. There is a desperate longing for normalcy. At last we have a normal president with a competent administration. But this is not a normal time. American democracy is in crisis.

Many urge us to follow the path of bipartisanship to lead us out of this danger. As much as the Biden administration may be trying to restore a sense of normalcy to our nation after the past four years and as much as Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and others seek the time honored goal of bipartisanship and common ground to solve our problems, those are elusive goals.

We have all lived in an America with two political parties for generations. It is the only way we understand to participate and speak about our politics. A two-party lens is the only way the news media knows how to cover Washington and, of course, elections. It’s why so many of us cannot give up on the idea that there must be a two-party solution to the danger of the moment. I wish it was possible. It’s not.

There are no longer two healthy parties in America. The catastrophic mistake for our nation is to continue to see the fight as Democrats vs. Republicans, left vs. right. We are at war with an authoritarian movement fueled by former President Donald Trump. It includes many of the 147 Republicans who signed on to treason with their Jan. 6 votes objecting to Joe Biden's win, and it has grown since then.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/07/06/stop-trump-authoritarianism-joe-trippi-lincoln-project/7814381002/

Here’s what to expect from Tuesday’s tally in the N.Y.C. mayor’s race.

New York City’s Board of Elections will release a new tally of votes in the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday.
Let’s hope it goes better than it did last week when officials announced inaccurate figures and had to retract them.

The updated tally on Tuesday should include most of the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots that were not included in the first count. It should give us a better sense of who is likely to win the race, though final results are not expected until next week.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/nyregion/nyc-mayor-race-votes.html

Thremaining portion of Champlain Towers South has been demolished.

At 10:30 Sunday night, authorities detonated charges inserted into holes drilled in the part of the 12-story Surfside condo that stood tenuously for 11 days after half of the structure collapsed in the middle of the night on June 24th, killing at least 24 and trapping more than 100 in the rubble of dozens of units that fell in circumstances still not completely understood.

Officials paused a frustrating and complicated search-and rescue effort Saturday to prepare for demolition, which sent a plume of dust and smoke into the sky, a cloud that blew west into the neighborhood of single-family homes that make up the sleepy beach town of Surfside.

According to the Texas Tribune's Patrick Svitek, West declared his candidacy during a July Fourth appearance at Sojourn Church in Carrollton, Texas. "I can no longer sit on the sidelines and see what has happened in these United States of America," West said in a launch video.

West told The Texan: “I’m not running against anybody. I’m running for Texas.”

A retired Army officer, West was elected to Congress from Florida in 2010 as part of the national Tea Party wave of candidates, but was narrowly defeated for reelection two years later.

A favorite of House conservatives, West drew two votes for speaker (from Louie Gohmert of Texas and Paul Broun of Georgia) over John Boehner in 2013 even though he was no longer a member of the House. West considered challenging Republican Sen. Marco Rubio for reelection in 2016 but ultimately declined to do so.