Safeway announced that they will close a supermarket in San Francisco, California, early next year over criminal activity, marking the latest consumer brand to shutter locations in the city.

The supermarket chain has witnessed incidents of assaults, loitering, and theft in recent years at their location on Webster Street, which serves the Fillmore and Japantown neighborhoods, according to San Francisco Police Department records analyzed in a report from the San Francisco Chronicle. The location had to close self-checkout kiosks last year to reduce theft.

Safeway wrote in a letter to San Francisco Democratic Mayor London Breed obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle that the “ongoing concerns about associate and customer safety, as well as persistent issues with theft,” were the reasons for their decision to close the store.

The company said they remain “committed to serving San Francisco” at their fifteen “remaining locations in the city” and will ensure that “our unionized workforce can perform their jobs in safe and secure working environments.” All employees will indeed be reassigned to other locations.

Safeway will shutter the Webster Street location in February after remaining open for eleven extra months in order to “provide a greater transition period.” The community is nevertheless starting a protest and boycott of the supermarket in the days before Christmas.

Many restaurants, shopping centers, and convenience stores continue to leave certain neighborhoods in major California cities amid persistent theft and property crime.

California witnessed a spike in crime levels amid the lockdown-induced recession as officials and activists across the state pushed for defunding the police and implementing criminal justice reform, calls which some progressive groups have since reversed as a result of the crime wave.

San Francisco has witnessed other consumer brands shutter their locations throughout the city in recent years, including chains such as Starbucks, Whole Foods, Walgreens, and Best Buy.