Last week I wrote about a string of robberies in San Francisco that left business owners struggling to recover without any help or attention from police. One bar called the Black Magic Voodoo Lounge was robbed and it took police 15 hours to respond. That robbery happened a few days after a very similar robbery just up the street. It took police 36 hours to respond to that one.

Today the San Francisco Chronicle has a story about another type of robbery that has become more common over the past couple years. Thieves are targeting plumbers who are out on location, often stealing their trucks and all of the expensive tools they bring with them.

Bradley Marshall Jr. parked his Chevy pickup truck next to the job site on Linda Avenue, a tree-lined street in Piedmont where he had been hired to repair a leaky waste line.

Finding no one at the customer’s home, Marshall sat in the truck and waited, jotting estimates on a clipboard. Then he heard a tap on the passenger side window, and saw a figure in a ski mask. Turning to the driver’s side, he glimpsed the barrel of a semiautomatic handgun pointed right at his head.

“I put my hands up,” Marshall said, recalling his terror on that July day in 2021, a shudder catching in his throat. “I said, ‘just take everything.’”…

“I’ve been working down here 20 years, and it’s never been like this,” said Marshall, whose family-owned business, Harry Clark Plumbing and Heating, is teetering from the emotional and financial toll of these robberies. In the past 18 months, according to Marshall’s father, Bradley Marshall Sr., thieves have stolen at least eight trucks and scores of tools from the company.

The targeting of service vehicles has become a trend because unlike fixed job sites which often have multiple people and even security on site, plumbers called out for work are often working alone. In Oakland, the problem has become so serious that various companies that usually compete are working together to hire a security specialist:

At a recent meeting of the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association, board member Spencer Ferguson, of Mr. Rooter Plumbing, in Oakland, implored his peers to pool their money and hire a security consultant for active shooter and self-defense trainings.

“We found a person from Los Angeles who does trainings for what to do when someone sticks a gun in your face,” said another Oakland plumber, Heiko Dzierzon, explaining how businesses that normally compete are now collaborating to organize a training session. The association’s executive manager, Krystal Reddoch, said she wholeheartedly supports the effort.

Some contractors are now asking for security as part of their contract and others are refusing to work in Oakland neighborhoods they feel could put them at risk. PG&E is now hiring police officers to guard workers at job sites. All of this raises the obvious question: What are police doing about this? Police say they can see the trend of robberies targeting work vehicles but they obviously can’t follow every truck out on every job. So for the most part the thieves get away with it.

And just like the clerks at drug stores, employers have told their workers not to resist the robbers who are often armed. No one wants to be responsible for an employee being shot or killed. And the tools and vehicles are insured. Thought as we’ve seen in other places, insurance will drop these companies if they make too many claims. At some point, this constant harassment will probably drive some of these companies out of business.

As for the stolen merchandise, it often winds up for sale online on sites like Craigslist or eBay where the sellers are anonymous. Officially, companies like eBay have “zero tolerance for criminal activity,” but in practice it obviously isn’t stopping the thieves.