Speaking at her weekly press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the leaders of a party whose members have called for defunding the police or no more policing responded to a question about the rampant crime plaguing her native San Francisco by stating, “There is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where.”
A reporter asked, “The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, expressed concern about crime, said, ‘It’s time for the reign of criminals to end.’ What do you think about some of this crime, specifically in San Francisco — ‘snatch and grabs’ — and also, generally, is there some sort of a federal response? I mean, we’ve passed crime bills here before; there’s something — looking at some of these problems.”
“Well, specifically to what is happening, not just in San Francisco, but in other parts of the country, you’ve had retail association of the whole country and leaders and business across the whole country have asked for a remedy, and we do have one as we are preparing the CHIPS bill, for lack of another — you know what I mean when I say the CHIPS bill,” Pelosi replied. “The CHIPS bill is about chips; it’s about supply chain and it’s about research. And we’re very close to our own agreement in the House on that. Within that bill, the Energy and Commerce Committee has something called INFORM, and that is legislation that would require those who are selling online especially to establish their legitimacy as to where these products came from.”
“Because what people do is they steal things and sell them online,” she surmised. “They have to establish their legitimacy if they’re going to be sold online and then in addition to that — that’s Energy and Commerce — the Judiciary Committee has a bill, Safe Shopping, it addresses the same problem in a little bit of a different way in terms of holding platforms accountable and those selling things for the provenance of those goods. It’s out of the question that people should be able to think that they can just steal things, profit from them, and not have any accountability on it. So those two things, some combination of those two things, both of them are going to be in the bill, how they come together, we’d be working with the Senate to pass that legislation.”
When pressed about San Francisco, Pelosi replied, “It’s absolutely outrageous. Obviously, it cannot continue, but the fact is that there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where. Maybe you do. And we cannot have that lawlessness become the norm. And these people coordinate with each other, and they plan traffic patterns and the rest so they can reach their goal and depart very quickly. Some of it is high-level stores, as the retailers have told us, and some of it is your local Walgreens, but none of it is acceptable. And again, it has to be stopped.”