This news really highlights the confirmation bias that was in full bloom throughout the "discourse" around the initial reports of Lee's murder (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899). Everyone is so quick to jump on negative news about the rare violent crime in e.g. SF thanks to feelings about petty property crime that it's obviously impossible to have any kind of fact-based dialogue about policy.
Worth keeping in mind next time something comes along that might confirm your priors.
(Edit: notable that the thread linked above had _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]. I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"? )
I remember as a teen going to my dad with some outrage bait news I'd heard on the internet that totally fit into my preconceived notions, and he just said "Now think about that for a second. Does that sound like something that's fully true, or is it something that someone thinks you want to hear?"
It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.
I lived in SF for ~15 years, experienced multiple car breakins (when I had a car) and one weird guy who walked up to me on the street and said "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" (which I somehow calmly ignored). For the record, I didn't comment in that thread and I generally don't feel the need to bash SF in public - I just simply moved out.
The only thing I'm "championing" (just pointing out, really) is that certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities, despite all available data contradicting that worldview.
I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.
On the other hand, I feel like it takes an incredibly public tragedy for a platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.
People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.
> quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities
I don't see why speaking out about lack of police enforcement is seen as 'quasi-apocalyptic'.
> despite all available data contradicting that worldview
All available data is in favor of those speaking out about crime & drugs in west coast cities. Additionally, the eye test seems to portray a situation that's more dire than even the data might suggest. (underreporting, catch & release).
> People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.
Indeed, because that's not what this forum is for. There's ten thousand fora online for general, local, or city-policy political discussion; those topics are only germane in this forum when they relate to tech or the processes of tech.
Because HN is a technology discussion board with a worldwide audience, not a local politics one. YCombinator isn't even based in SF.
When the CEO of YCombinator blocks people on Twitter for disagreeing with him online on SF politics[0], it tells me I don't want HN to be a haven for that.
FWIW, he mass blocks people who have _never_ interacted with him on twitter. If you happen to like a tweet from an account that he doesn't like, you're blocked!
I get that people need to protect their feeds for their mental health, but I'd expect a public figure to have thicker skin and not default to hitting the scorched-earth-mega-auto-block button so often.
I wouldn't really take who YCombinator execs have blocked with much of an indication of anything. It's a badge of honor to be blocked by Paul Graham over something silly and petty.
It's indicative of the exec's desire to actually engage on a topic with people who might disagree with them. That's a big issue with how much control they can potentially exert on this site.
> platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.
I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.
I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"
EDIT: Just to cite my sources: [0] shows 397k registered cars in SF [1] shows 810k residents.
> I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.
As a European on this platform it's ceaseless whinging about the state of SF and how the "woke mob" are ruining San Francisco and the state of the Tenderloin versus Mission or Market or whatever and I don't particularly care to know.
Like I've started to learn the parts of a city I have no particular interest in visiting from repeated stories about how someone shouted and pooped in the street because of boogeyman de jour.
Definitely feels like maybe YC could make a "local HN" to save the rest of us from these circular discussions.
I appreciate you saying so. As a 20-year SF resident I wondered if it was just confirmation bias making me think those topics/views were incredibly common. But it's at the point where I'd almost rather deal with Bitcoin boosters.
>I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"
Hmm, the vast majority of tourists in Orlando aren't Orlando residents, but if I got murdered back in my hotel on a Disneyworld trip, I would hope they'd be willing to at least poke into it.
You must have some filter on. There are literally thousands of HN posts in the last few years about housing and crime and hundreds of which devolved into the dystopian hellhole memes endemic in the HN ideosphere.
The quickest path to karma at HN is to post anything about BA housing.
Crime - and SF crime specifically - frequently gets discussed on HN when crime-related stories make it to the front page. You're not paying attention if you think the site has a zero-tolerance policy for it.
Someone saying that the have a gun and are going to shoot you is very clearly assault, which is a criminal act. It would generally quality as a violent crime in statistics (if SFPD took reports of threats of violence, which they will not).
While we should use data, we should also understand where there may be issues with the data that we're using.
The gist of your point is 100% correct. I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.
> Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.
Calmly ignoring the threat is evidence that the person was not "in immediate apprehension of such a contact".
I only bring this up because i think it's interesting, and the underlying point you are making is 100% correct. This kind of thing is not normal nor innocent and not to be tolerated.
Oh, I was definitely apprehensive of imminent harm.
More details: Fairly normal-looking dude walked up next to me and kept pace for a couple minutes, threatening me and calling me "faggot" (which seemed odd, since I was walking with my girlfriend at the time). I didn't see an actual gun so I figured that the safest course of action was to simply ignore him until he presented more of a threat or walked away. I guess I bored him so he walked away.
For sure. I didn't mean to derail the thread or tell you how you feel, just share what I think is an interesting aspect of assault as defined in common law. But your subjective experience here is exactly what the law means to recognize with assault and sounds like it was assault. But who knows. Glad the situation fizzled out (usually best case scenario)
> I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.
This is actually an interesting point of semantics to me. I guess it'd really hinge on how you define "calmly" here - if you saw me walking my dog while a homeless person screamed that he was going to kill me, I would certainly appear calm. Even internally, I suspect my heart rate would increase but not enormously. Still, I would be very alert and mentally prepared for the possibility that this person is going to attack me, because I very much believe that to be possible. Given that, I would say that I have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harm (and I expect a lot of San Franciscans are similar in that regard).
It's a reasonable belief and fear that person will carry out the act. You are probably misinterpreting the reasonable part, especially when people mask their reaction to try to get away or out of shock / instinct. The person making the threats probably gets enjoyment from getting a rise out of random strangers. Also, returning to the original context, there are too many people on the street that have severe mental health crises going on and are freely roaming some cities. They don't necessarily need to go to be convicted of a crime as a solution.
We should also take practical steps to increase your chances of survival, which, if someone says this to you:
- Keep an eye on their hands.
- Attempt to de-escalate the person.
- If they brandish a weapon in extreme close proximity to yourself, use both your hands to firmly grab onto the hand/wrist that's holding the weapon and extend your arms fully (using your skeleton to maintain that distance and provide added strength). Your focus should be on controlling that hand so they don't stab or shoot you. Yes, you may incur injury regardless, this is what's colloquially known as a "shit sandwich".
- Increase distance and vacate the area as soon as possible. If they have a gun, run in a zig zag pattern and seek cover (blocks bullets) or concealment (hides you, but doesn't stop bullets).
- Once you are safe, then report the incident to law enforcement (if they'll do anything).
You mean well, but this is Hollywood-grade advice for close quarters encounters.
Arms extended gives you the least possible leverage. Like when cops in movies run around with gun drawn at arms' length (the Weaver stance is for target shooting). To disarm a gun-wielding opponent, you want to get in close, grab the weapon from both sides securely (hug it) and do a dead drop. Unless you're fighting The Rock, they can't hold both you and the weapon. Unless you are The Rock, you'll probably get killed grappling with them any other way.
Don't do this for knives. Just stay the length of two arms + 1 beer bottle away from them.
I don't have any advice for swords but anyone who comes at you with one isn't playing by conventional rules, so run like hell.
The zig zag thing is a myth. It works in Counter-Strike, but you'll just end up dying an embarrassing death in reality. The only zig zagging you should be doing is from cover to cover. Get to cover as directly as possible. This isn't The OA...interpretive dance won't save you.
PROTIP: As cover goes, cars are made of the same stuff as beer cans and glass. The IC engine block is the only part that will actually stop a bullet. EVs are explosive.
> certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities
For those interested in the topic, I recommend Loewen's "Sundown Towns". My copy's on loan, but I think it's in Ch 11, "The Effects of Sundown Towns on Whites" that he talks about the culture among descendants of white-flight suburbanites, their low-to-no-experience views on the horrors of the city, where Those People run rampant. Many are terrified of even going to cities. To people who actually live in the cities, their view is almost unrecognizable.
As an example from something in my feed reader today [1], take Theo Wold, a former Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy (under Trump) and current Idaho Solicitor General. He quote-tweeted a photo of a white woman hugging two Black men. They were the Tennessee Three, the state legislators who were under threat of expulsion for protest.
His comment: "Every Red State will have to wrestle with the fetid, urban Leftist vote sinks. That begins with asking the question: why does the GOP continue to push the annexation/development of rural land that only grows the size and power of Leftist strongholds?"
Fetid stronghold sinks! Sounds pretty bad. In our favor, at least we have taco trucks on every corner.
It reminds me of nothing so much as this bit from Chairman Mao: "It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres and other people in the cities should be persuaded to send their sons and daughters who have completed junior or senior middle school, college or university, to the countryside. Let us mobilize."
Considering that a large population of sf tech is migrants, many people, myself included, compare it not to other American cities but to European and Asian ones.
I would say that the comparison is apt - since we compare the tech/science successes of SF with the rest of the world, we should also compare the crime rates with it.
It might be helpful for you to take a class on gun safety to reduce the anxiety you have about seeing guns. Remember, the police also open carry because peaceful open carry is primarily about deterrence.
Brandishing a weapon is legally different from open carry, and is already a crime. Brandishing means to draw or exhibit the weapon in a threatening manner, or to use it in a fight, other than in lawful self-defense.
What an absolutely asinine thing to champion. How does that do any good to actually help with "policy" as your initial comment seems to intend? All you seem to be doing is acting like "I'm smarter than all of you!"
SF is a dangerous city. That seems to be the main point of concern here.
Well if we’re inventing types of danger out of whole cloth and proposing solutions to them they probably won’t help with anything. We also should probably quantify what “dangerous” means if, as both that post and the article say, violent crime in San Francisco is actually exceptionally low.
No one is denying crime is a problem. The point is that people were quick attribute this tragedy to yet another unprovoked attack, which turned out to be false. But it fit the narrative, so it was believed to be true.
It's not just this tragedy, it's any tragedy. Every time there's a mass shooting, people use it as a rallying cry for more gun control, rather than focusing on fixing the issues that actually led to the violence (usually severe mental health issues), as if people haven't used knives or vehicles to commit mass murder/violence. Never let a good tragedy go to waste, so the saying goes.
A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife. Seems like it's always a gun. Probably because a gun makes it really easy to kill people quickly.
Six people were killed and 14 injured after a knife-wielding man stabbed passersby on a pedestrian shopping street in the eastern Chinese city of Anqing:
I don't consider two of those to be good comparisons to mass shootings of the "kill dozens of people in a couple minutes" variety.
The Saskatchewan stabbings were attacks at 13 separate locations across a sparsely populated reservation rather than a single mass casualty event.
The Sagamihara stabbings were attacks on sleeping disabled patients inside a care home. It reminds me more of Angel of Death type mass killings (by nurses / doctors). He considered it to be euthanasia and the weapon could have been a pillow - the mass killing was not down to the deadliness of the weapon but the passivity of the victims.
The Anqing attack is a better example - a single event against conscious victims. Nevertheless, mass stabbings across the whole globe are rarer than the daily mass shootings in the US.
"A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife.
The Canadian incident took place over days and 13 different locations. The other two incidents don't say how long they took but it just takes way longer to kill people with a knife than a gun.
I am not fully researched on this topic, but as a lay observer it appear that the gun rights side basically categorizes anyone who is willing to commit a mass shooting as mentally ill, and hence every mass shooting is a result of mental illness by definition. But it does not follow that mass shooters are mentally ill by any professional standards.
If this is a valid premise, then you know you are doing something wrong as a society. Mass shootings are common place in the US (with currently 177 mass shootings this year so far). This is not normal.
US isn't even close to the top of the list for mass shootings in the world and it is not "common place". Most "mass" shootings, which could be just three individuals, are gang related and added to the data for mass shootings.
Not even three. GVA includes a lot of incidents with just two individuals being shot, so long as at least two other people are present for the incident.
It’s actually nothing like that at all. People keep bringing it up because the US has the second highest number of gun related deaths of any country in the entire world.
hermitdev claimed that if guns weren't available, people would use knives or cars instead. So the fact that gun related deaths are higher in the US is irrelevant. And they do have a point: knife murders are more common in Europe than they are in the US.
But not by much. The fact that the murder rate in the US is 7X the murder rate in Europe is a much more relevant statistic.
The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.
There is not any evidence what so ever that a person who might commit a murder with a gun would just use the next available option to them such as a knife. That was something that was just introduced to the discussion as a fact when in reality it’s something you have made up.
In fact it’s immediately clear that to most people they are two very different things precisely because one of them is literally just pushing a button.
There is a reason why the murder rate is 7x higher because the access to guns requires a much lower buy in to commit the act in the first place.
Hence why people argue for stricter gun control laws. Mass access is precisely the problem.
There's much less opportunity to attack someone with a knife and it involves a lot more personal risk. You're likely to get stabbed back unless they're totally unprepared. It's much more difficult to do a "drive by knifing".
1. You can't remove all guns, you can only remove the legal ones.
2. If you had the ability to remove illegal guns from society you would have had the ability to remove the criminals in the first place.
3. Even if you did remove the millions of guns and prevent manufacturing / imports (even though you can't for drugs) you don't know for certain murders will go down. These people are ruthless. Jumping people with machetes is always an option. It may be worse since guns are an equalizer and let people defend themselves. You're a lot less likely to run up on someone when you know they have a gun.
~25% of the murders in the US are already committed without guns, so even if you removed gun crime outright and no one decided to commit the same crime with a different weapon, the US would still have ~2x the murder rate of Europe. Not that this is a case against gun control, as we're still (very theoretically) saving ~15,000 lives a year. But it does suggest that there is a cause for the differing rates that is not related to guns.
Here's the murder weapon statistics for 2019 from the FBI[1]. This only includes homicides for which the weapon is known. We'll assume that the rest match the distribution, though I suspect if you can't identify the weapon, there probably aren't bullet holes.
Summing total homicides gives 13,927. Summing total firearm homicides gives 10,258. 10,258/13,927 = 77.15%. I admit I did not do initially do that work and instead summed percentages from this infographic[2], arriving at 26.3% non-firearm homicide. I can't explain the discrepancy, as they point to the same data. The total homicide count is 5 higher on the FBI site, so possibly the page was updated later on. I point this out to clarify that I rounded the percentage down, which is why I felt comfortable with .25 * 7 ~= 2, though the answer with the new percentage is 1.59. I'd round to 1.5 if I did it again.
If you want a source for Europe's homicide rate being 1/7 that of the US, you'll have to ask the person I was replying to. Wikipedia[3] says Europe's murder rate is 3.0 and the US is 6.5, but I expect the person here was restricting it to the EU or something else along those lines (also various sources differ, and it's something that changes over time). I don't think the restriction changes either of our points, as long as the 7x number does really exist.
I can't recall ever having seen an NRA ad but I don't imagine my comment sounds anything like one. If the NRA really does say in their ads that they're not making a case against gun control and that it could save 15,000 lives a year, I don't have a problem sounding like them.
We both understand the concept that the US has more than 1 major social problem at the same time right and that other countries also have comparable levels of gang membership but wildly different murder rates.
So everyone who is currently killing each other with guns will see their enemy gang in the street and not decide to slash them because they are too lazy? They only wanted to shoot them?
It's the type of gangs in America, it's not about "gang membership" or whatever metric you're trying to throw out.
They shank people with tooth brushes in prison. MS-13 decapitates people with axes. It's the gangs, not the guns.
Chicago and many cities in America would be safer with more legal guns, less gangsters.
The problem with saying that SF has relatively low violent crime is that it ignores the constant, extremely aggressive verbal assault that people are just accustomed to. In the years I lived there, I had people scream at me that they were going to kill/stab/etc. me at least a couple of dozen times (I would describe this as violent crime). Of course, if you call SFPD, they'll just tell you it's not an issue and ignore you, so those don't go into any statistics.
You're right, "violent crime" is a term of art that involves the commission of a…crime. "Verbal assault" is not assault. I guess if you don't like the vibes in a place, you can go somewhere else, but trying to use such things to influence how people talk about or perceive actual, no, for real crime is intellectual malpractice.
You've got a really weird black and white view of these things. As long as people aren't literally murdering you then it's ok? The idea that "real crime" only happens AFTER the actual crime has taken place is super bizarre. That's not how the world works.
Go find me a city that has people that are super happy and nice to each other and also has a high murder rate. Wait, I bet you can't.
Talking about the petty crime and the "vibe" is absolutely on topic for this, because that sort of laissez-faire attitude leads to murders like the one we're discussing.
>Talking about the petty crime and the "vibe" is absolutely on topic for this, because that sort of laissez-faire attitude leads to murders like the one we're discussing.
... you mean the murder in question that, as we've found out in this article/thread, has nothing to do with the "petty crime" and "vibe" that you're referring to?
Still seems like a good opportunity to me to bring up the general "whatever" nature in SF regarding crime. Perhaps this stabbing took place because the assailant felt more brazen knowing that the police in that city won't do anything?
Let's just let the homeless and the mentally deranged do whatever they want in SF. That's definitely a good way to run a modern city. Better than hurting their feelings! /s
>Let's just let the homeless and the mentally deranged do whatever they want in SF. That's definitely a good way to run a modern city. Better than hurting their feelings! /s
If that's the takeaway you're getting from this comment chain, I really don't know what else to tell you.
> Go find me a city that has people that are super happy and nice to each other and also has a high murder rate. Wait, I bet you can't.
Many Mexican and Brazilian cities have much higher murder rates and people are still generally happier and nicer than in the US, especially if SF is the basis for comparison.
Your comments are disingenuous. A decline in the quality of life in a city due to crime, substance abuse, homelessness and untreated mental health disorders has an immense affect on one’s well being. That goes doubly so for people with spouses and children.
If you are confronted by a mentally ill person screaming threats at you, is your first thought to seek comfort in the violent crime stats? You must be some kind of robot, if so.
Threatening to assault someone is, in fact, a real crime. You cannot, legally, go around "screaming that you're going to kill/stab/etc." people. Looks like Penal Code 422, if you need a concrete reference for California specifically
The problem is you actually don't understand what assault is. Assault does not involving actually touching someone - that's battery. What you're describing as verbal assault is actually assault and is a real crime, generally considered to be violent crime in crime statistics.
We should convince the SF tourism board to use this motto. Come to San Francisco, where our vibe is constant threats of murder but you probably won't actually get murdered!
Just to offer a counter-anecdote: In 8 years of living in SOMA, which has the 2nd highest crime rate after Tenderloin, nobody has even once threatened to kill me. Or even hinted at wanting me harm.
Property crime is a different story. That has indeed been a problem.
Why even offer a counter-anecdote? Are you trying to give the impression to impressionable people that not every person gets threatened with murder on a regular basis here? That’s true, but it seems like you’re just trying to discount one person’s lived experience. I know women that get groped on MUNI regularly but not every woman gets groped on MUNI. People don’t usually threaten me, but I’ve stopped people from threatening others in front of me. Hell, I’ve stopped a guy from trying to roll another guy sleeping on the street into oncoming traffic. Nobody has ever stolen my phone from me, but that doesn’t mean phones have never been stolen from people.
And before you go to the stats, just remember something: lies, damned lies and statistics. If the police don’t get involved, there’s no police report. If the DA doesn’t charge a crime, there’s no “crime” even if there actually is. Homicides and property crimes tend to leave the most evidence behind, but those aren’t the only crimes that matter and even the criminal amounts of piss and shit around just the MUNI and BART stations probably isn’t generating any police reports either. Verbal harassment and threats also don’t tend to generate enough of the right kind of paperwork to make it into the stats, but it doesn’t make it less real.
Against a deliberately facetious post someone made that was a follow-on to a follow-on of somebody else’s anecdote?
Let me put it this way: needing to counter an anecdote with your own comes across as unsympathetic at worst and apathetic at best. “Yeah that happened to you, so what? It doesn’t happen to me!” kinda vibes.
It happens enough that too many people have these stories about San Francisco. They’re the kinds of things that can happen anywhere, but San Francisco is one of the places where it is talked about as happening a lot.
I think what gets me is the underlying classism that oozes out of these conversations everywhere I turn. People here (in SFBA) are oh so liberal and progressive ... as long as the undesirables aren't in _their_ neighborhood. Then suddenly everyone's pearl clutching.
For the most part they mean you no harm. Just because people are poor, doesn't mean they're dangerous.
One of the dumbest examples was when a neighbor asked me to stop putting cardboard boxes in recycling because "it attracts the bad element and then they camp in our street". Ffs man they're homeless, let them have a damn box.
The homeless people you're advocating for are the worst victims of the homeless people being criticized in this thread. You do no favors for people who happen to be poor by providing cover for the crazies.
If there were more being done about the people threatening violence, intentionally urinating on passersby, molesting women, accosting people in the streets, your neighbor would likely be less concerned about the cardboard box people.
My first time in SOMA I had a homeless guy almost piss on my shoes followed by another guy shadow-stabbing with a real knife and pointing at me. Let's call it a mulligan.
You're wrong. Verbal assault is assault, and is violence, because it leads to the reasonable expectation of violence. You don't know if the crazy person threatening to kill you will actually try to do it so you have to imagine that they will.
You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment and have been breaking them in other places too. We ban accounts that post like this, so would you please stop?
You just learn to tune it out. Crazy people gonna crazy. It's like the announcements that come over the PA at airports for "Please report any unattended baggage - if you see something, say something", or 99% of what the news media writes, or Putin's threats to nuke the West, or the breathless pitches of startup founders that they're going to change the world.
> It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad!
Steven Pinker has made a career out of this. Ironically a lot of his adherents are quick to jump on the "this is the safest time in human history" statistical warbling when discussing an issue they feel doesn't personally affect them.
Steven Pinker made claims about humanity as a whole. We can definitely be in the safest period in human history while at the same time having some cities that are pretty dangerous
It’s impossible to reason with anyone from SF who thinks the city isn’t that bad. Reality is most large cities are absolute trash now. But at least where i live i can talk with people who aren’t living in some reality distortion field
>It’s impossible to reason with anyone from SF who thinks the city isn’t that bad. Reality is most large cities are absolute trash now. But at least where i live i can talk with people who aren’t living in some reality distortion field
I'm 56 years old and have lived in NYC for most of my life. And I can tell you (and provide appropriate statistics if you're unwilling or unable to look for that easily available data) that NYC (I can't speak to SF, although my brother and his family lived there for many years -- including in the Tenderloin -- and I found it a delightful place) is enormously safer and cleaner than it was for the first 35 or so years of my life.
When I was a child, there were street gangs in most neighborhoods, people would put signs on their car windows noting the lack of valuables inside in hopes of not having their windows smashed (In one case, circa 1978-80 I saw a car with its window smashed and the little sign that had been on the window saying "no radio, nothing of value, and the perpetrator of the vandalism wrote "just checking" on the sign). You almost never see that any more.
Streetwalkers were in most neighborhoods (even the nice neighborhoods), leaving used condoms to litter the streets every morning, Times Square was a shithole. No Disney store -- mostly just porn shops and peep shows, and with con artists, robbers and other miscreants.
Cocaine (crack, mostly) was openly sold on street corners even in wealthy neighborhoods.
Homicides in 2020 were less than 1/3 what they were in 1980[0] (and while that number increased significantly in 1987, that was because of a change in classification when "cause of death" was "unknown", the death being classed as "homicide" whereas previously, those were not included in "homicides" previously[1].
So, no. Large cities (and SF among them -- although NYC is, on a per-capita basis even safer than SF) in the US are, for the most part, enormously safer than they were even 15 years ago.
And since you don't seem to have much of an idea of what's really going on (and maybe don't care if it doesn't fit your trained-in prejudices?), I'll give you a tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!
[1] I searched around a bit, but couldn't find anything online, but that's true for a lot of news from before 2005 or so. But it was big news, because (see graph in [0] above) "homicides" increased significantly due to this change.
> It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.
"You can be mad but I guess I don’t personally view my car as an extension of myself and I’ve never really felt violated any of the 15 or so times my car was broken in to. Once a guy accidentally left a cool knife in my car so if it keeps happening you might get a little treat." --Seth Rogen
I’ve been accosted by strange people in multiple cities if that’s the standard of disorder now. Not saying it’s nice for that to happen but I don’t think it says much about SF.
>I’ve been accosted by strange people in multiple cities if that’s the standard of disorder now. Not saying it’s nice for that to happen but I don’t think it says much about SF.
As have I. One of the most serious was at the bus station in the huge metropolis of Santa Cruz, CA[0] (population ~63,000 in 2020).
As I've said elsewhere many, many times: There are assholes everywhere.
I also lived in San Francisco. Was never threatened by a random weirdo. Lived in a different city and was threatened (he said he would beat me to death). But somehow the city I live doesn't have constant bellyaching about how dangerous it is despite having a higher violent crime rate than San Francisco.
>It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.
You are making the poster's exact point for them. Take a step back, breathe, think.
And as other folks in this topic are pointing out, anecdotes like that are simply misleading. San Francisco is not a high crime US city. Period. It is not. It is middle-of-the-pack at worst. Nor is it getting "worse faster". It saw a crime wave across the pandemic that is receding now, just like most of the world.
It's just wrong. You're wrong. Any narrative to the effect of "SF is unsafe because of ..." is wrong, because SF is not unsafe in any measurable way.
And more to the point: those very (wrong) narratives are simply out of control among the prevailing demographic here on HN. And frankly it's getting kinda toxic.
Well, no. SF is not unsafe in any measured way. You can easily observe from this thread, anecdotally, the police routinely ignore people shouting threats and other crimes. It's entirely possible that if we actually measured all of those, and counted them as the crimes that they are, that SF would look remarkably worse.
Do police measure "shouting threats and other crimes" anywhere, though? You're literally inventing a new category of crime just to be able to claim SF is the worst. Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?
Blunt counter-hypothesis: Tech bros are a bunch of suburban snowflakes who never lived in a dense urban environment before and are addressing their culture clash with hate instead of understanding. This is anecdotally true in my experience, which means I'm right by your logic, no?
> You're literally inventing a new category of crime
There are actual laws against threatening people I'm not inventing anything. I grew up in a major city with plenty of crime problems, and I still absolutely expected police to respond to someone who had a knife and was threatening to kill people. Clearly things have gotten worse if they're now ignoring such crimes.
> Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?
First, I never claimed SF was the worse - I simply said we don't have enough information to make reasonable conclusions in either direction.
Second, Occam's razor says that if the crime statistics are the same in two cities, but we have a ton of anecdotal evidence that one city is ignoring certain crimes, then that latter city probably has a higher crime rate.
If we had page after page of anecdotes that SF techies are just snowflakes and what they're responding to is totally normal, that would obviously change the equation.
Of course, keep in mind, if you're right, we've simply established that EVERY major urban center has a huge problem of "crazy people threatening people on a regular basis", and that's still an incredibly undesirable situation that we want to fix.
I'd also be curious why I don't hear about people from New York, London, Seattle, etc. reporting that it's totally normal for crazy people to threaten them with a knife. Surely there are techbro snowflakes in Seattle, at a minimum?
No, it would be the narrative where multiple HN commenters in the previous thread took this as a launching point to call for a full authoritarian crackdown of the homeless.
Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.
But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.
> even the best city in the US is still relatively bad
Your parent didn't mention the "best city in the US" though? Per the linked table it seems to be Irvine CA at 0.72 per 100k, which would be below average in the UK or France.
Takes the American "unwalkable city" trope to the extreme - you can't even really bike there. People live in isolate subdivisions (gated, often) connected to the outside world by mega-arterials with 6+ lanes.
It's not surprising it ranks so low in murders - it's hard to get killed when you're only outside for the time it takes to walk from your parking spot to the shop.
By comparison, there were 93 murders in 2022 in the West Midlands (the UK region encompassing Birmingham, UK). That's a rate of 1.56 per 100,000 population, which I agree is pretty bad - but it's almost 50x less than the equivalent for the US city.
I grew up in St Louis. We didn't worry so much about murder for cause as someone had to specifically dislike you (cheating on/with spouse for example). We just watched the street crime rates.
That said moving to the west coast people freak out all the time about yearly murder rates that are a weekend in STL.
A lot depends a lot on distribution, which surface level stats don't reveal. I've lived in very high crime rates that were perfectly safe because it was a mixture of 'don't go to these areas' and basic interpersonal stuff. I've also lived in areas that were far safer on paper, but were substantially more dangerous for me because crime was far more 'equal opportunity.' I've no idea of the situation in San Francisco but this could easily explain the perception : stats relationship.
Exactly, murder stats aren't necessarily a good measure of how safe a city feels to a typical dweller. Many city homicides are gang-related, and if the gangs only operate in specific areas, killing eachother, the city can still feel totally safe to other people. Constant theft really weighs on the psyche- needing to worry about everywhere you leave your bike locked or park your car is a burden.
To your point, Ulaanbaatar felt like one of the more dangerous cities I've been in because people would rob foreigners in broad daylight on crowded streets, but I don't think there was much homicide at all.
> Constant theft really weighs on the psyche- needing to worry about everywhere you leave your bike locked or park your car is a burden.
This was my experience living in Chicago. While violent crime was much higher than on the West Coast, it was highly localized and it remained true that if you didn’t go looking for trouble, it usually wouldn’t find you. There is affordable housing and the social safety net hasn’t completely collapsed so there are many fewer cases of out of control mentally ill folks on the streets.
Meanwhile, petty property crime felt like it was much lower. Car break-ins definitely happened but it was not at all endemic like it seems to be in LA or SF. Although I’ve heard this has changed if you own a Hyundai or Kia due to a security vulnerability in many of those cars permitting easy hot-wiring. The new security patches rolling out will fix that problem, I hope.
There are several neighborhoods in Chicago with almost all the amenities of NYC/SF, low crime, but much lower cost of living. Although housing costs in those neighborhoods have gone up quite a bit as more and more remote workers figure this out.
(yes, it gets cold sometimes, but you can always take some of that money you saved by moving and get on a plane somewhere warm)
Per capita rates are often hard to compare (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any conclusions). I find the rates often have more with how boundaries are drawn and are especially inaccurate for smaller populations as a reflection of overall safety. There's probably an element of that in the St. Louis numbers.
I once saw a crime map of the boroughs in a city where I lived. It showed the downtown as way higher than others per-capita, but it's because few live there as it's mostly commercial, more than higher absolute numbers. Lots of effects like this skew the numbers.
Yeah, Saint Louis is a weird case because it has a really tight boundary compared to most cities, so the crime numbers you see are all about the urban core and don't include data from the suburbs.
This NYT article has some numbers comparing "metro areas" rather than cities, and it knocks Saint Louis down a few slots (while still leaving it amongst the worst in the nation, for sure): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/upshot/crime-statistics-s...
Sweden is in the middle of a gang crisis with people murdered every week... still, the murder rate over the last several years has always been below 1.23 (the highest value, in 2020).
According to this[1], Sweden had 116 murders in 2022, less than the peak in 2020, which was 124. Basic maths tells me that' around 1.104 murders per 100K people (current population is 10.5 million).
Also worth noting that SF contains most of the Bay Area’s high-crime areas, yet the city limits are much smaller than those of most major American cities. So that skews the crime rate upwards. There’s a similar dynamic at play with several other American cities.
The line drawing was a policy decision, and it makes regional level policymaking near impossible, creating adverse incentives for suburban jurisdictions and constraining the options of local policymakers in SF. It’s the cause of many of the Bay Area’s current social woes.
The list of counties with the highest rates of violence listed on that article are all southern and rural and not known to be associated with gang activity that I am aware of.
> _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]
On this list of homicides per capita [1], San Francisco ranks far higher than Austin in incidents per capita of "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter": 2.57 per 100,000 people in Austin, vs. 6.35 per 100,000 in SF.
It also ranks higher than New York, Portland, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle.
Thanks for that. I admit to buying the narrative. Part of that is because my nearest city of any substance is Portland, and it's not especially violent. SF does look more violent compared to Portland, but objectively SF is actually just average or less. Lots of big cities are more violent[0].
I grew up in a violent town (high murder rate - even blatant). The difference between that and SF is that you don’t personally experience that violence in my home town. It’s really quite rare it affects someone you know. It’s even rarer for it to be direct.
SF is different. Within my first year there i had already seen someone shot in front my building (i didn’t witness it but the aftermath). An asian friend was slapped and her phone taken - she’d have given the phone anyway so the slap felt unnecessary. You fear parking your car - not trembling in your pants fear but a dread that you’ll have to deal with that shit again (now the breakins happen while you’re still in the car). You don’t know when someone is yelling on the street whether they are harmless or gonna attack you - doesn’t have to be a weapon just yelling at your face with saliva splattering all over you would traumatise you enough - yup, that happened too. My girlfriend and I used to try to help them. We’d give them leftover food - bakery items mostly. We’d see that all tossed on sidewalk when we walk that way again. There was always glass on the sidewalk. There’d be random tents you’ll have to get around. This is daily and adds up.
Like I said, I grew up in a violent town. So avoiding travel at night or going around the house locking windows or being aware of the approaching blind dark spot is something I’m used to. Most everyone around me was not. Even those from the Bay Area haven’t seen. I used to think they were weak but the truth is no one has to put up with it and I think people have the right to “feel” safe as well.
(Again, none if this will show up in a statistic and I’m not saying these people should be locked up in the name of tough on crime either. These are absolutely property crimes and quality of life crimes but you do feel fear and dread almost everyday)
I grew up outside of one of the most violent cities in New York State[1]. My high school was right in the middle of Newburgh, NY, and being a teenager, I spent a lot of time driving around the downtown area at night. There were a handful of blocks you stayed away from and you were good. Granted, this is with the benefit of a car, rather than walking around.
Ultimately, random acts of violence are scary but even in the "most dangerous cities" statistically rare. The politicization of city violence "What about Chicago? What about SF?" is an instant red flag that whomever you're speaking with is making a bad faith argument.
> I grew up in a violent town (high murder rate - even blatant). The difference between that and SF is that you don’t personally experience that violence in my home town. It’s really quite rare it affects someone you know.
If it has a high murder rate, that obviously is not true for all values of “you”.
I went to Portland for a week last year. I saw 6 different instances of a violent, obviously mentally ill, presumably homeless person physically attack a random person (once at a restaurant, twice at a tram station, thrice on the street, all broad daylight). That was more instances that I had seen in 5 years in Philadelphia, a city jokingly referred to as Killadelphia.
Portland might not have a lot of gang violence (which is what really gets numbers up), but not violent isn't how I would describe the city.
I've lived in the vicinity of Portland for almost 50 years and haven't seen as much violence as you did in one week. You must have been hanging in really rough area of town, or just got very unlucky.
I spent 1.5 days in downtown PDX (roughly around the Portland City Grill) recently and my experiences roughly match the OP.
It was shockingly bad. Crazy, violent people "everywhere". Tents covering the sidewalks. There wasn't a parking garage around where there weren't piles of human excrement.
This was staying in Downtown and the "Lloyd District" I suppose it was called. Leaving those areas did seem a bit better, but it was still pretty bad. In the same time frame I was in downtown Newark, Trenton, Baltimore, Detroit, NYC. Portland was by far the worst of the bunch.
>but not violent isn't how I would describe the city.
It depends on where you are in the city. I live in Portland and I don't think I've someone get attacked in the entire time I've lived here. But I also live in an area that is less popular with the mentally ill and drug addicted
Homicides has gone up during the pandemic--56 in 2022 vs 41 in 2019. I think NYC also went up, but NYC is still safer than SF (5 deaths per 100k vs 6.9 per 100k for SF).
Yep, and when we sort cities by population density, it's a good bit higher than 37th. SF has plenty of problems, but apparently violent crime isn't the most noteworthy of them.
Citing murder rates (and ignoring other crimes) is one of the preferred tactics of people who want to say that big cities have low crime rates.
Police in big cities go after big crimes like murders, but tend to ignore "lesser" crimes, so as a result, gangsters and other career criminals stick to those lesser crimes, and generally do a lot more of them.
No, because they don't correlate with violent crime rates, which are also tracked. Murder is actually a really weird crime: if basically never happens between people who don't know each other.
A useful source was literally cited in the comment I replied to. Look at rankings of cities by crime. You will find SF and NYC close to the bottom of the pack on murders, but toward the top on property crimes and low-level violent crimes.
You completely misrepresented what they would prosecute, literally from the article you linked to:
> marijuana misdemeanors, including selling more than three ounces; not paying public transportation fare; trespassing except a fourth degree stalking charge, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration in certain cases, and prostitution
Literally nothing you insinuated. Please stop peddling lazy lies and ideas.
You might want to read the primary source before accusing someone of lying. Misdemeanor assault and petty theft are also on the list. I admit that I chose a left-leaning article to cite so that people like you would read something rather than dismissing it outright as biased, but the primary source is linked there. CNN, apparently peddlers of "lazy lies" themselves, chose not to put the full list down.
You didn’t link anything to prove your point. And you’re literally blaming CNN for how you spun the article? I’ll stop here because it’s clear you’re irrational.
The article I liked to you had a link in it to the primary source at the very top of the article. Read the primary source. Every secondary source spins everything - always go back to the primary source if you want the news.
By the way, the full list of crimes that are not getting prosecuted is very long (covering a lot of misdemeanors and a few felonies), and CNN wanted to write an uplifitng story, so they chose the crimes that I presume are popular to not prosecute. It's not that complicated to understand the bias, and I'm not suggesting that anyone has done anything malicious. I only said that they were "peddling 'lazy lies'" because that source did exactly what you accused me of (misrepresenting what they will and won't prosecute).
A lot of people (particularly on this forum) try this form of lazy argumentation where they ask for sources for any claim they don't like so they can go try to poke holes in one source or another without actually doing any research. If you want to argue about something, go do some research and stop accusing other people of "lying" and "irrationality." What you are doing here is a textbook example of arguing in bad faith.
It's not a bad deal at all, if that's what they stick to. It's really mostly non-violent thefts these days. That still doesn't make the area "low-crime" or "safe."
The thing that's so weird about that confirmation bias is that some folks held these inconsistent views even within a single HN comment.
There was a comment that was on that initial thread where the commenter said that they heard from "very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit", and the commenter still went on to blame San Francisco for being a "crime ridden shithole". I responded with this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456746 , it was just bizarre to me.
That's not what the comment I was replying to was saying. It's possible for both to be true, but it's definitely cognitive dissonance to on one hand think "it was a hit" and then at the same time blame the general crime problems of San Francisco for Bob Lee's death.
That's what a lot of the replies here seem to be missing. Sure, I think SF has a pretty bad crime problem that needs to be addressed. What deserves opprobrium is all the tech elite who immediately spouted on Twitter and elsewhere that the government of SF had "blood on their hands", again specifically blaming SF government and SF's overall crime environment for Bob Lee's death.
The number of high profile tech bros on Twitter using the death to further their own views was disgraceful. SF may have big issues but using someone’s murder to further your political beliefs is horrible. I’m sure we won’t hear any retraction though.
Watching from outside, the whole "Tech Bros vs. Woke Hippies" framing is just nuts. It's at most a local politics dispute over control over the SF city government. And yet it's spilled over into all kinds of radicalized global thinking.
People like pg and Garry are out there on twitter acting like the nutjobs trying to deny their startup workers housing and teach their kids about colonialism as a history paradigm are the Greatest Threat To Free Speech Worldwide.
Is it time now to maybe take a deep breath and think about maybe calling a truce? The hippies can be rough to live with but really they aren't so bad. I know a bunch.
I guess, if viewed cynically. It seems more likely to me that he was sincere, just wrong. That's the "radicalized" bit I was talking about. The SF tech scene has a smell right now that seems to me a lot like what we saw with the Gamergate incels a decade ago. And that... didn't lead to good places.
Radicalization happens to everyone, even the rationalists. Maybe it's just time to cool off.
The piss on the homeless views always get aired whenever a homeless person does something bad, or is accused, without evidence of doing something bad.
It's couched in 'the woke are ruining everything letting murderhobos run rampart' rhetoric. Sometimes with a helping of 'the police are completely unable to function if we subject them to any oversight, or hold them accountable to the rule of law.'
You see this take very frequently on <your local city subreddit>.
If you talk to actual cops, they're burnt out and quiet quitting like the rest of us. Scope creep has been marching steadily over the past decades: we're asking them to do too much; they're not trained for many of the kinds of interactions that they find so taxing. It would be better for everyone if they offloaded that work to others who are better qualified. This means giving police less money, and giving other services more money.
> using someone’s murder to further your political beliefs is horrible.
Agree that it's gross but we do it all the time, and I think too often it only feels horrible to people when the political beliefs aren't align with one's own. If the loudest voices in this incident had been pushing for increased funding for supportive housing or mental health services, would Joe Eskenazi have written an article titled "Bob Lee deserved better than to be killed — and then co-opted in death"? I kind of doubt it...
It was really surreal, reading through that thread and watching everyone assume they knew exactly what happened when there had literally been no public information given out about the suspect.
My wife asked me "how do we know the killer was a homeless guy?". I could only reply - "good point".
I think a part of it is people are fed up with how the city has deteriorated and no amount of gaslighting will change that fact. So, when he was killed it seemed like just another thing in the decline of the city.
I thought the reason was that someone had looked at CCTV footage of the event, and saw someone who looked homeless. Of course, most of us software engineers proudly go for the "clean homeless" look.
Post any story - tech, biotech, engineering, finance, war - and half the comments are people confident they know “the real story” and how everyone is wrong.
Agreed! It was really disgusting how everyone immediately turned the news of his passing into political posts designed to trash the entire city of San Francisco, when it was obviously too soon for anyone to know the full story behind his unfortunate death.
I hope this news brings his family and friends some closure.
> While Lee is one of a dozen homicide victims in San Francisco this year, his is the only killing that has garnered national coverage — or, in most cases, even cursory local coverage.
> San Francisco’s other homicide victims in 2023 are Gavin Boston, 40; Irving Sanchez-Morales, 28; Carlos Romero Flores, 29; Maxwell Maltzman, 18; Demario Lockett, 44; Maxwell Mason, 29; Humberto Avila, 46; Gregory McFarland Jr, 36; Kareem Sims, 43; Debra Lynn Hord, 57; and Jermaine Reeves, 52.
Maybe this speaks to me being in a worse location, but I'm sitting here thinking "it's April and this major city has only had twelve homicides? That's pretty great!"
A ton of people care about property crime and I don't think you should look down on them.
SF has 3-5x the property crime of most major cities in the United States. I imagine most violent crime is targeted (i.e. the victim is not a random person walking down the street), but property crime is scary because it can happen to the best of us, our friends and our family, in even the "safest" neighborhoods. We all know friends whose cars have been broken into. And it's easy to imagine --- what if my kids were at home during one of these home break-ins? (Note that burglaries are not classified as violent crime in SF)
You're performing a sleight of hand. No city census or national crime analysis categorizes burglary as a violent crime, and I'm not sure why you called SF out on it.
I don't look down on people complaining about property crime, I'd just like them to be honest about what they are complaining about.
SF is 55 out of the biggest 100 cities on burglary rates, by the way.
(It's interesting how all this is apparently a controversial take.)
> No city census or national crime analysis categorizes burglary as a violent crime, and I'm not sure why you called SF out on it.
Most other cities aren't wallowing in it the same way, and aren't holier than thou despite their polices clearly having caused the issue. But you're right, it's not just SF. LA and Seattle are pretty much right there too.
The crime cities like SF are worth calling out in a way that other violent cities aren't though because there's a giant epidemic of what we're pressured to call "non-violent crime" like shoplifting and car theft that gets violent instantly whenever the criminal doesn't get their way. I've personally seen people get shoved out of the way of a fleeing thief, and videos of people being attacked when they come back at the wrong time and discover their car being robbed. To say SF isn't violent ignores that the residents are on the edge of violence constantly.
> SF is 55 out of the biggest 100 cities on burglary rates, by the way.
These crime rates are what's reported by the police and they refuse to take reports of anything that hasn't escalated so they ignore most of what the everyday person suffers. These statistics should be seen more as evidence of collusion in the SFPD, not used to prove the safety of the city.
That's a strange way of spelling Cleveland, Memphis, Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Baltimore, Albuquerque, Detroit, Mobile, Cincinnati, Toledo, Des Moines, Seattle, Indianapolis, Spokane, St. Louis, San Bernadino, Bakersfield, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Durham, Orlando, Wichita... And I can't be bothered to list the next 30, all of whom also have more burglaries per capita than SF, and most of which also have more assaults, murders, and rapes.
LA is #73 on the burglary index, by the way.
You're making a lot of claims, and providing zero data for them.
> These crime rates are what's reported by the police and they refuse to take reports of anything that hasn't escalated
I live in two of the drug cities and visit others, and pay taxes that support many of these policies specifically. Do you live in one of the west-coast cities in question, or is this an abstract political battle for you? If you live here, do you feel you're a representative resident?
> if all you have is anecdotes, speculation and just-so stories?
Well, there's the crux of it, these are anecdotes that have happened to me personally. Over decades of experience and watching things change. And there's tons of data collected by victims but as has been pointed out, the news often chooses to report on acknowledged crime where a police officer has been sent out and taken a report. FB groups where people log violent street interactions or businesses' windows being broken show a definite uptick that government statistics don't. I know it's true because I walk past enough of those broken windows and stabbing sites to provide a reality check for what I'm seeing published.
We know that there are vastly more actual rapes than reported rapes and punished rapes. Why it is so unreasonable that there are vastly more actual attacks and robberies than reported?
> [other cities] all of whom also have more burglaries per capita than SF, and most of which also have more assaults, murders, and rapes.
Perception of livability despite violent crime has a lot to do with the localization of that crime. If only certain areas, at certain times, are dangerous - and if those areas are ones that can be avoided - then you can generally just go elsewhere with your family and be fine. That's the liberal way SF and such used to work. Sure, there were sleezy places but the street people would even helpfully and quietly warn tourists - "Hey bud, there's a lot of drugs down here, you should really take your kids a few blocks that way."
But once it spills over into random attacks outside that area, such that you can be killed at the busiest coffee shop in the city, the entire veneer of safety goes away.
We're saying two main things: that it got bad really quickly and predictably, and it's being officially downplayed.
> Please provide a shred of evidence that this doesn't happen in any of the other other cities listed in
It's somewhat annoying that what should be an issue of local policy ends up being purity-checked by people trying to decide if we're too partisan in national politics. We're talking about our policies, not trying to claim that other cities can't fail just as hard as we are but with a different set of errors.
That's great; in general, people should be, and I'm not looking down on them for doing so.
However, property crime is absolutely irrelevant when presented with the news of someone's murder, yet so many people here are quick to conflate them as somehow equivalent vis a vis personal safety, etc.
(Sidenote: I personally don't understand anyone thinking that property crime is "scary". Your car is not your kid. Your wallet is not your body. Your house is not your family. These things are not in the same class, and a loss in one category is not the same as a loss in the other. I'm not sure how one could argue otherwise, but it's apparently a widely-held worldview.)
A burglary is much scarier than someone stealing shit from your car, because someone invaded your living space in the latter. It's a much more serious invasion of your privacy than a broken window smash and grab.
The point I made in the sibling point stands, though. At 55th in the nation, SF does not have a high burglary rate. It has a high larceny (stealing from stores, cars, etc) rate.
I'm not comparing e.g. burglaries to car thefts, but the category of property crimes to the category of violent crimes. The former range from unfortunate nuisances to unpleasant material losses (depending on how well you've scoped your insurances); the latter can be life-shattering tragedies.
People (on the whole) aren't afraid of losing stuff. They're afraid of someone coming into their home or grabbing them on the street and things going south. If you somehow had a device which 100% guaranteed your personal safety (but somehow still allowed theft) then (for most people) most of these crimes would merely be an inconvenience/irritation on the same level as low level credit card fraud (where you lose no money but have to get a new card).
Your "legitimate question" is insulting to me and to those who actually are autistic. Everyone on HN is so nice.
No, I don't think being pickpocketed (or having my car stolen or whatever) is "equally as scary" as if my daughter were assaulted or kidnapped. I'd be ashamed to think they're equivalent, lest my daughter believe I view her as valuable as a hunk of steel or a wad of cash.
> Property crimes lead to a generally dangerous living area and people don't like to live in dangerous areas because it necessarily leads to more violent crime.
This is deeply incorrect. As has been repeated and cited over and over, violent crime in e.g. SF is not particularly high (lower than most other US cities), while its property crime rate is outrageously high.
I really don't understand your viewpoint here. You seem to be implying that property crime is fine and dandy and no one should really be worried about it because "having a child assaulted is worse!". Again, a bizarre world-view, hence the autism question.
Just because they're not emotionally equivalent doesn't mean that property crime isn't bad. SF has a massive issue regarding petty crime. It leads to a more dangerous city overall.
>Just because they're not emotionally equivalent doesn't mean that property crime isn't bad.
In sticking with the autism question - are you? OP has yet to state that "property crime isn't bad" yet you've commented repeatedly to imply that they have, among other things.
You've unfortunately been crossing into personal attack and name-calling repeatedly in your HN posts, as well as breaking the site guidelines in other ways. We ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so could you please stop?
It was a legitimate question. I truly don't understand how anyone can imagine property crime as "not scary". I was trying to get a better understanding of the person so that I would not be rude if he actually was neurodivergent.
It's extraordinarily hard to differentiate between trolls and non-trolls online anymore so I don't see what's wrong with asking that of someone.
Off-topic: That particular HN discussion contains many users creating a political narrative, and even at the time it was obvious there were many bad comments. I wish we had a way to downrank users that derail conversions with crap.
Are there forums with better user moderation systems that boost ranking of quality comments and decrease ranking of comment noise? Something where I can systematically increase the ranking of comments of users I respect (or I transitively respect), and decrease the ranking of comments for users that I see write crap. Ideally tagged (e.g. I want to uprank a particular users opinions on programming languages, but I want to strongly downrank their economic opinions)
> are there forums with better user moderation systems that boost ranking of quality comments and decrease ranking of comment noise? Something where I can systematically increase the ranking of comments of users I respect (or I transitively respect), and decrease the ranking of comments for users that I see write crap
It seems like you want a personalized filter bubble to confirm your pre-existing views and hide comments from anyone who even votes the same way as someone who contradicts your views. This is generally considered an anti-feature in public discussions, especially on HN. Calling all posts that you disagree with "crap" and ignoring them does a disservice to the conversation and to yourself.
The actual "crap" does get filtered out pretty well: the spam, slurs, trolling, low-effort jokes, and other things that derail the conversation. What you are calling "crap" are people's genuinely-held beliefs, some more coherently expressed than others, but which resonated with many others here. It is much better to engage than to ignore. I see that you didn't comment in that thread, which is a shame. Substantive disagreements are what move us all forward.
You might want to try Facebook, they do a really good job at keeping you in your preferred group's information cocoon.
You are right that it's not the content of the views here that are really the problem, or principally shouldnt be.
But the overriding, horrendous issue is how threads and discussions are hijacked for the sake of every other guy's soapbox, and this thread in question is particularly exemplary here.
I have certainly accepted at this point that, e.g., some people see homeless people or drug addicted people as essentially subhuman. And the mechanics of free speech and discourse dictate that I see such views as having a place in some discussions (especially on this particular website it seems), however much it contradicts what I see as fundamental humanity or whatever.
But, to me, it didn't really feel like the right time or context in that thread. But I maybe I am wrong!
Like, I definitely accept that I personally have to stomach a lot if I want to see the discourse on this site in general, and I agree I don't necessarily want the bubble. And indeed, this is just what "living in a society" is all about. But so much in that particular thread just really felt misplaced and fundamentally insensitive, however essentially valid they were themselves as views. And I think that thread is just a good example not a one off thing.
> personalized filter bubble to confirm your pre-existing views
I seek learning through intelligent and insightful rebuttal. HN is a good forum to learn from others directly, and indirectly by reading other people’s threads. I want a forum that does this better, via network effects of judgements about comment quality.
Your comment contains many baseless assumptions about my motivations. Is there irony in that this thread is not on Facebook, that you are attempting to disagree with my point but I am engaging with you, and that your comment likely breaks multiple guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HackerNews is still better than just about every site out there with this high of a profile. Once the bad faith trolls take up residence, discourse goes into the toilet. At least 99% of HN posters are earnestly trying to make a point they believe in. HN just isn't sexy enough to pull in the trolls.
Avoid non-tech discussion here and you are almost all the way there. There's a chrome extension to block a user's comments. Probably not too hard to make one or modify it to highlight users you like.
The argument I made to all my friends in this debate (but not publicly) was along the lines of “tech exec found dead at 2:30am near his home in an upscale neighborhood with zero night-time activity … that doesn’t sound random”
My guess was drug deal gone wrong. But tech deal gone wrong makes sense too, I guess.
edit: my drug guess was before the person was named, not implying anything, just know drugs are a popular hobby in SF
It could still have been a drug deal - some companies have a guy who is the "hookup."
The problem with the discourse was that everyone forgot that people basically never get randomly murdered. There's almost always a reason for a murder - number 1 is domestic disputes, number 2 is gang-related, and the list goes on, but almost nobody gets murdered randomly. Assaults and thefts are a different story, and SF's problem with those crimes got conflated with a murder (which is a rare crime in SF).
It’s an upscale building but I wouldn’t call it an upscale neighborhood, especially at night. It’s only a couple blocks from the bay bridge overpass and the overpass attracted some non-upscale activity.
At the same time though I’ve spent many late nights in the area and never had any negative encounters.
The story contradicts what so many here took as a given, that Lee was a victim of stochastic violence in SF. The highlighting is in revealing that so many were wrong in applying their biases to the original news, and then using that to leverage into e.g. condemnations of the city in general.
I mean we all know the reality was that people who don’t like the very liberal politics of SF were reasoning backwards to get to the “liberal politics causes murder” confirmation they crave. I don’t think anyone even pretended that condemnation of the city was a new conclusion for them.
The Internet has made it virtually impossible for people to say "I just don't know yet." Everyone feels like if they don't immediately come to a conclusion they're like left out or something.
I saw this most extremely during COVID, and I usually hate "both side-ing" things, but I did see this pretty extremely on both sides. "MASKS DON'T WORK!!", "YES THEY DO!!", "IT WAS A LAB LEAK!!", "IT WAS ANIMALS FROM THE WET MARKET!!", "KIDS ARE FINE!!", "KIDS ARE AT SERIOUS RISK!!". It's like at some point I just wanted to scream "Maybe we just don't know yet."
I get sick to my stomach reading that thread. It was close to the last straw for me with regards to leaving this community completely, or at least trying to fight my HN habit.
I get a lot out of the things shared here and the discourse, but sometimes we get those threads and I just can't believe so many otherwise smart, intelligent people would believe and say such horrible things.
I remember rolling my eyes alot while reading the comments in that thread. I would expect many of those people will double down rather than offer any mea culpa.
It’s interesting. The initial post that mentioned that Rob Lee was murdered got mass flagged and stayed at the bottom of the page. There’s discussion about his murder and crime in general, but the top comment is asking people not to be political and to post their memories of Rob Lee.
The only submission about Rob Lee’s death that stayed at the top of the page was one that didn’t mention that he was murdered in the headline, and where dang came in and told everyone to keep politics out of it and avoid flamewar stuff.
People said it was reasonable that people mass flagged any submission that mentioned the murder in its headline, because it was flamewar stuff.
But now we have this submission. I looked through all of the top comments, and they’re _all_ using this to talk about the larger “is San Francisco safe?” debate. About half of them are specifically complaining about other people’s views, including complaining about other Hacker News comments.
That's absolutely not what happened. This, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899, was the original post that got a lot of traction about Bob Lee's death. I was one of the people who flagged it pretty early on, not because I thought it wasn't newsworthy, but because it was one of the biggest collection of dumpster fire comments I've ever seen on HN - hardly anyone was interested in anything but spouting their own preconceived notions, particularly since at that point very few details were actually known about the crime.
But as you can see from that link and the vote counts, it was definitely (pretty quickly) unflagged, and then you can see in the top comments that dang just split the threads into 2 separate posts, one for rememberances of Bob Lee and the other one remained for political discussion.
I agree with you that we shouldn't be using anecdotal evidence to drive outrage and public policy. There are a whole host of biases and errors that pop up when using anecdotal evidence as you pointed out.
The flip side is that people have zero interest in statistics-based discussions. Even supposedly data-driven engineers. If you find that property-crime has increased by X%, of which Y% can be attributed to specific public policy decisions, you will get zero traction if you frame this as a data-driven discussion. People grok stories. They may somewhat understand statistics and numbers, but they don't grok it. Hence why almost all discussions revolve around anecdotes with some statistics provided as supporting evidence.
Ironically, for-profit companies are far better at having data-driven discussions and decisions. I have little hope that this will ever be the case in public discourse.
Also we are all so proud of being rational and data driven while ignoring the actual murder rate in SF, which is well below average in America. Now you can say that it's high relative to the rest of the world but most people here want to shit on SF relative to the USA too.
As soon as I saw the reported murder I figured it was a business partner who felt scorned, but then HN narrative continued for a full week about the lack of safety in SF. While things might be bad, random murders by strangers are still a rarity compared to targeted killings.
I find it strange that nobody is mentioning the Hindenburg Research report against Square that came out a week before the stabbing, and the fact that there’s likely a fraud investigation underway.
>I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"?
From the looks of your replies, more than a few are back to comment here to say "Actually I am still right."
Which, frankly, seems to me more evidence I should just not bother to browse threads about this kind of inflammatory subject. Even on HN where discussion quality tends to be better, there's plenty of people who just show up to shout, and not listen.
When i heard about it at first i thought maybe it had something to do with MobileCoin… maybe someone lost a lot of money or was afraid to lose market share.
Then when I commented I was really trying to figure out the mechanics of how it went down if it really were a robbery.
>hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city,
You’re doing the same thing in this thread, where the very article we are discussing shows that murders have been on the rise in the past 5 years.
Your comment was good, then you used the edit to spew your confirmation bias.
There was a woman in Portland I believe who poisoned her husband and made it look like a drug tampering serial killer situation.
They caught her because they found traces of fish tank algaecide in the pill bottles. She reused the same mortar and pestle to do both. The local fish supply store had records of her buying the same algaecide.
It's all relative. The safest parts of the U.S. still feel like too much for me. And I'm sure where I grew up in Canada would seem like a post-apocalyptic hellscape to some others around the world.
What was more incredible was being accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I had commented in the SF subreddit and on twitter that I personally didn’t think it was random.
SF still has above average violent crime[1]. Its top 7 in terms of overall crime, so being "just" above average for violent crime seems not so bad in comparison. But the objective reality is that BOTH property crime and violent crime is worse in SF than in most other cities.
Violent crime is rare everywhere, for some definition of rare. I can walk through the most dangerous part of Chicago tonight and I will almost certainly survive. However, if I do that every night for my entire life, the cumulative risk will be unacceptably high.
It would be wrong to insist Chicago doesn't have a problem with violence just because I have much better than Vegas odds of not dying today. SF has different parameter inputs than Chicago, but my point applies.
> of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami
Many of us mentioned this (I did in my comment), which is why we are so surprised about this murder. Now it makes more sense, although still tragic. We still get to gripe about property crime, which has been higher than average for awhile now and only seems to be getting worse.
Yeah the exact same thing happens with Portland every time it pops up on here. The HN audience by and large irrationally hates progressive policies and cities with them. It’s weird watching people here parrot the opinions of the corporate overlords.
Any topic on HN which is tangentially related to the Culture Wars (progressive cities/DAs among them) typically has several comments bashing the "woke".
I don't think this is a great representation of what's going on.
There are many legitimate problems in Portland. If you go on any online discussion you'll see residents showcasing them. Those threads get barraged by liberals and conservatives that don't live here either defending or attacking the issue at hand. None of this is helpful.
I wish you could hear the frustration in my voice. Frustration at the Progressive Party for picking ideology over the health of the city, frustration at the right for turning our local issues into national showcases, frustration with the people in the comments who think commenting on the goings on of a city they don't live in is anything but a bad faith take.
I am tired. I want Progressives and Republicans gone, and from what I can see I'm part of a growing group in this city. We'll solve our own problems in due time, extremists can get lost.
The Chicago one gets me. I am not in SF often but we have taken 3-day weekend trips to Chicago since my children were 3. Multiple times walking around downtown, enjoying Navy Pier, even a couple of cases where we were walking to our hotel probably later than we should have after the fireworks.
Not once did we ever feel unsafe in the 10 years we have made trips out there. But read the news and you'll think it was a lawless warzone.
I don't exactly blame people, who live in SF and have seen crime get worse, from latching onto a high profile murder as more evidence of crime out of control.
So this particular murder was a personal thing, ok.
But that doesnt change the fact crime has gotten worse in SF.
You're doing the same thing now. We don't even know if this is actually the perpetrator yet, and even if it is it doesn't matter. Anything bad (or good) that was written about SF can still be true.
> I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"?
Sure, people were wrong in their assumption that the murder was random. At least that's how it looks now. We haven't heard the suspects side, but....
But wrong that SF has become a dangerous and mismanaged city? Murder isn't the only violent crime and a lot of crime goes unreported. People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience". The fact that everyone assumed that Bob Lee was murdered randomly says something about the state of the city.
SF has a lot of issues and it has a lot of crime and other issues. It has been mismanaged for years now and things need to change.
People see homelessness and open drug use and petty property crime, filter it through their ideological lens, and amplify that into feeling that they are themselves somehow less safe. You can assert that that is rational, but it's as connected to reality as someone feeling afraid when e.g. a black person is walking behind them.
Saying stuff like "a lot of [violent] crime goes unreported" is straight up fanciful thinking, and leads one to make claims that aren't falsifiable. People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.
I have personally witnessed a few assaults in NYC that I am sure went unreported. I don't think it's the same kind of thing you're thinking of: these are things like fights that happen in bars, which are usually handled without police involvement, not random attacks on the street. And claims about unreported crime are falsifiable - see studies like this one https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
> People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.
One reason this explanation falls flat is that reported and recorded property crimes have risen more. If the city were exceptionally underreporting crimes compared to the past or other cities, you'd see those disappear from the statistics more than e.g. homicides; it's much easier to ignore a stolen phone than it is a dead body.
Could that not be that you need to report/record a crime for insurance purposes?
There might be a good reason people would report some crimes over others for reasons over and above simply for the sake of reporting them/having them solved.
In that comment I didn’t even get to the new stories about a brick being thrown, creeps following her, or last night’s gun falling out of the pants of a meth head at the bus stop. I would feel unsafe as well, not like I’m immune to bullets.
Minimizing this stuff just because it was mentioned in the wrong thread is ignoring real problems. Two things can be true at once.
> Rapes, robberies and assaults are still well below pre-pandemic levels, and because violent crime is generally less likely to go unreported than property crimes, it would not be inaccurate to say that general levels of violent crime are lower now than they were a few years ago.
That IS a less safe space. What are you actually talking about? An area with homeless, open drug use, and petty property crime is 100% a more dangerous area. No one would allow their children to go walking through an area like.
Seriously what sort of weird ideological rant are you on in this thread? You have some really bizarre thinking regarding this issue.
People vote based on how they feel, so I'd say it is government's responsibility.
Especially since feeling safe is not the only thing government gets evaluated on. I don't feel threatened by feces on the street, and yet I'd want government to fix that too.
>People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience". The fact that everyone assumed that Bob Lee was murdered randomly says something about the state of the city.
It definitely says something about the people that made that assumption. But this is just tautologic - it's unsafe because I feel unsafe, and I feel unsafe because it is unsafe. As a NY'er, this seems like a ton of whining by people that never actually encountered any actual threatening, so they make these whiny, dramatic, histrionic arguments about how the city is "beyond" saving, using all sorts of overhyped rhetoric.
You must think you’re quite clever with that slight of hand comparing homicides in SF with other cities when people are talking about crime in general.
I'm not a Maoist so I can admit when I was wrong. Looks like it was a personal beef.
But that in no way changes the point that SF is a toxic environment. Here's the SF fire commissioner being brained by a violent homeless man this past week...
That goes both ways. I wonder if you would come back to this comment when one of your held beliefs are disproven. I won’t derail this thread into what it might be, but I won’t hold my breath…
> San Francisco recorded 56 homicides each in 2022 and 2021, up over 36% from 2019, when there were 41 homicides, according to police department data. Despite the increase, the number of homicides in San Francisco is well below that of other cities of a similar size, data from the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association shows.
> Indianapolis, for example, witnessed 271 homicides in 2021 and 226 in 2022. Jacksonville, Florida, meanwhile, saw 129 homicides in 2021 and 154 in 2022, while 204 homicides took place in Columbus, Ohio, in 2021 and 140 in 2022.
> Violent crimes in San Francisco, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, reached a high in 2013 with 7,164 violent crimes, according to California Department of Justice data. But they have tapered off significantly in the past couple of years. San Francisco now falls in the lower middle of the pack when compared with several cities of a similar population, according to data from the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association.
San Francisco is just "average", and possibly "below average", for violent crime. Claiming it is one of the most violent cities in the country is just hysterics with no basis in reality.
I was surprised to see in the article that SF has only had 12 murders so far this year. My city is less than 1/3 the size and has 14 murders so far, and it doesn’t feel like a lawless hell hole to me. Every murder is tragic, but almost all of them involve parties known to each other.
Thanks for the numbers. On the street except for murder cops won’t even take your report anymore. The numbers reflect nothing in SF and residents know it.
>The numbers reflect nothing in SF and residents know it.
Former, recent resident with a penchant for late-night dancing (read: frequently ended up in "seedy" areas in the middle of the night) chiming in. Never felt as though I was in danger while out and about, day or night, and never felt that SF was a more violent city than others.
Isn't it this way in almost every major urban US area? I was in St. Louis for a conference and got robbed, after I reported it to police and told them I had the current location of the suspects because they stole my phone and location services was still on, the police laughed at me and told me "what do you want us to do, go bust some doors down?", then instructed me to file a report but explained it might not be worth it to even bother doing so because there was almost a 0% chance of my stolen goods being returned.
Current resident. I walked 1 mile home late last night, through two neighborhoods that people call sketchy. The only thing that felt unsafe was the cars.
"On the street except for murder cops won’t even take your report anymore."
Completely false and you only have to look at the police crime dashboard to know that. I'm a resident and can say that the numbers track pretty closely with my experience here anyway.
I was just laughing about this position the other day: if the the stats confirm your position they’re accurate and can’t be ignored. If they’re not then the bookkeeping is wrong. A win/win situation!
Did you miss the fact that we had two entire elections to install a new reactionary pro-cop DA, specifically so that people who use this excuse to make things up about SF crime could can it?
> objectively one of the most violent cities in the country
The news article (and many comments in this thread) says the exact opposite:
> San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug-use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the police clearance rate for property crimes has long been minimal. But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low and is lower than that in most mid-to-large-sized cities.
Property crime is sky-high, sure. Violent crime is a totally different category. It is important not to mix them up.
2021 homicide rate across comparable cities:
St Louis 66.5
Detroit 47.9
Phila 34.8
Milwaukee 33.9
...
Austin 8.2
SF 6.9
...
NY 5.5
We can talk about other types of violent crime (maybe the other ones are higher, I haven't looked into them recently) but let's at least stick to the well-defined categories and since you said it's "objectively one of the most violent" then we should be able to back that up with stats in each category: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
That's exactly what it is. White collar upper middle class types are more exposed to it relatively (not necessarily absolutely) in SF than in other cities. Even if the actual odds of being victim of a violent crime are lower overall they're still higher per crime and people still feel more exposed because the market shares of the various things that make up the crime pie are very different in SF than in other cities.
In Chicago, Baltimore, all those other cities techies turn up their nose at for their crime rates you might get shot in a convenience store robbery, you might get knifed by a mugger but the overwhelming majority of the violence is drug dealers and users and distributors settling scores amongst themselves (because they can't use the courts to do it for them).
Contrast with SF where the overall amount (overall or per capita) of violent crime is lower but it is much, much more concentrated toward the randomly targeted crime affecting people not already involved in activity beyond the law types of creimes meaning that your odds of getting shot in a convenience store robbery or knifed by a mugger are higher in SF than a city of equivalent violent crime rates per capita that has a more normal looking crime pie chart.
Also the parent said "violent crime" not just homicides. In addition it is known that homicides among the homeless, of which SF is known to have many, are underreported.
In that case, try this[0] one that another HNer posted. It even allows you to sort by type of crime.
> In addition it is known that homicides among the homeless, of which SF is known to have many, are underreported.
Uhhh...Have you ever been around a decomposing corpse? They're not so easy to hide or dispose of, and the population you're talking about isn't likely to have the resources to do so.
As such, you might want to check the "source" of information you're relying on for that assertion. That said, I could be completely wrong and SF's homeless community has a bustling trade in disposing of bodies. But that seems pretty unlikely, don't you think?
Your comment indicates you do not understand the mental state of many homeless people. I have a good friend, who has beaten by a homeless man in Los Angeles. None of his wallet, phone, or cash was taken. It was not a robbery. It was a senseless beating.
It’s not extreme when you compare it to most other Western cities. If you want to get into undeveloped nations and dilapidated ghost cities, you’re just entering a different arena.
The endless tent encampments, open drug use, human feces on the street, glass/needles/trash everywhere, and rampant vehicle theft make the place unbearable. It is a shithole.
Western cities like Portland, LA, Eugene, or Seattle? Or is that just west coast and you also mean to include Baltimore, Detroit or St Louis? Many of those are worst. Or I could go to Miami or Austin where their states are trying to legislate me out of existence.
I don’t disagree things have gotten worse, but a wide variety of factors are contributing to this beyond politics. They’re also mainly occur in certain areas - I don’t come across all the things very often living in SF because I’m not in SoMA/civic center/mission where it’s all the most acute.
Not really, SF is a shithole for a wealthy North American city. And I say that as someone who grew up here and still loves this place.
Story time. We literally had squatters break into and occupy a house two doors down from us, on Sunday (Easter). I was gardening in the front yard and seven people came and went over the course of the day. The police came in the afternoon but missed them, and they came back that night. It took until Tuesday to get them out and lock down the building so they couldn't get back in. A similar incident happened across the street a few months ago, the squatters even changed the lock on the front door.
I've lived here nearly half a century and I've never seen anything like this. Oh, also, last month, a guy came through and busted into several cars one morning. He got five or six of us.
- - - -
The thing is, SF has always been a crazy shitty town. It's also beautiful and fun, but this is the town that grew from the Gold Rush. It was built by 49ers and the folks who sold them shovels and booze and women. It's always been crazy here.
So when people point to SF as the paragon of Left-wing politics, they are ignoring that it's not really a functional city and never has been. The port is in the East Bay where the train tracks run, eh? No trains on the Golden Gate Bridge, eh? There's no economic center here (except the artifical banking nexus, but that doesn't need to stay here, SV bank was in SV.) And the weather never gets better. The entire rest of the state has better weather. The people who think SF has nice weather typically stay in one of the tiny microclimates that avoid the worst of the wind and fog.
Seriously, go look at the trees in Mission Rock. They are all at 45 degree angles because the damn wind never stops. They should have put wind turbines on the roofs of those nifty new condos (the ones with the sidewalks breaking away from the buildings.)
Oh man, I could go on and on about this town.
All I'm really getting at is that, if you know the history of San Francisco, you know that it's not really a left-wing exemplar, it's just a nuthouse, and always has been since the USA kicked out the Spanish. (What the Spanish did is the stuff of nightmares. Before that it was the Ohlone people here, and I don't know what they were like. There are still a few Ohlone people around but everybody is real careful not to mention them except in the past tense because it breaks the illusion of inclusive progressive politics. We still want to e.g. build apartment buildings on their old cemeteries and such.)
Because the dataset is incomplete if even a single city doesn't opt into sharing data, or only provides a portion of the real data.
From the FBI itself:
> Pitfalls of Ranking
> UCR data are sometimes used to compile rankings of individual jurisdictions and institutions of
higher learning. These incomplete analyses have often created misleading perceptions which
adversely affect geographic entities and their residents. For this reason, the FBI has a long-‐
standing policy against ranking participating law enforcement agencies on the basis of crime
data alone. Despite repeated warnings against these practices, some data users continue to
challenge and misunderstand this position.
That's the point: there is no dataset that will allow you to reliably rank every "major city" by crime stats because every city reports crime differently and no crime dataset also accounts for factors which may affect those statistics (eg law enforcement misreporting crimes for political reasons).
How do you even define a city in this case? You say those are normalized crime stats per 1k residents - how big are the metro areas? Are there any cities that also count a portion of their suburbs as part of the city? Does doing so reduce per-capita crime stats? etc...
My suggestion would be to thoroughly vet your sources before posting their conclusions as fact.
No I didn't. I've been working with UCR data for 10+ years and I recognize it in the wild. Furthermore, my points still stands regardless of the source: "there is no dataset that will allow you to reliably rank every 'major city' by crime stats because every city reports crime differently and no crime dataset also accounts for factors which may affect those statistics."
If you know where their source data comes from and why its so accurate, feel free to educate me. Their own site says this:
> Q. Why rank cities on safety even though the FBI cautions against it?
> A. This report and/or our data cannot and should not be used as a measure of the effectiveness of law enforcement due to the myriad factors that can contribute to crime in a community.
This is suprising to me as non-American because Detroit reads to me "like gang-infested murdercity" and I would have expected San Francisco to do significantly better in crime numbers...
Are the numbers misleading or IS criminality in San Francisco comparable to Detroit?
The numbers are misleading because they're based on voluntary reporting from law enforcement agencies to the FBI's UCR program. The FBI has this to say:
Data users should not rank locales because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place. UCR statistics include only jurisdictional population figures along with reported crime, clearance, or arrest data. Rankings ignore the uniqueness of each locale. Some factors that are known to affect the volume and type of crime occurring from place to place are:
• Population density and degree of urbanization.
• Variations in composition of the population, particularly youth concentration.
• Stability of the population with respect to residents; mobility, commuting patterns, and
transient factors.
• Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
• Modes of transportation and highway systems.
• Cultural factors and educational, recreational, and religious characteristics.
• Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.
• Climate.
• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
• Administrative and investigative emphases on law enforcement.
• Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial,
correctional, and probational).
On the link you provided (https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime) there's a "Source & Methodology" link which says "Raw data sources: 18,000 local law enforcement agencies in the U.S." and "Date(s) & Update Frequency: Reflects 2021 calendar year; released from FBI in Oct. 2022"
The FBI puts out one main source of crime stats - UCR. On the UCR site that I linked to: "The UCR Program includes data from more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies." Those numbers aren't a coincidence.
UCR is the main data product that people use for (usually incorrect) analysis. The FBI itself says that the data is incomplete to the point that it should not be used as a way to determine the safety of a location.
They even discuss it in detail:
"What makes NeighborhoodScout® Crime Data uniquely accurate?
Most city neighborhood crime data are incomplete and inaccurate because crimes are reported by individual law enforcement agencies, rather than by city or town, and many cities – even small ones – have more than one agency responsible for law enforcement (municipal, university, county, transit, etc.). Even FBI data are reported by agency not by city or town, providing an incomplete assessment of city-wide crime counts. It is an agency-centric rather than locality-centric reporting method. If you use FBI data, you only get city-wide general counts, and only from one agency in the city, so it is generally incomplete for the city overall, as well as not specific to a neighborhood or address."
And further:
Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
The results are fine resolution, highly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.
Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively.
In some cases a city agency is in charge of law enforcement, while in other areas it’s a county. In many cases it is more than one agency for a geographic area. Since the geography varies, it’s difficult to compare the scores among jurisdictions, or to get a true and complete picture of crime risk. This is why we use a relational database to assess the true count of reported crimes in a locality.
Although most agencies report, not all do. This creates holes in the data. Our method allows us to accurately fill in the holes based on the crime experience of many like locales, and provide accurate crime data for anywhere in the U.S.
The quote you posted offers no actual information about how they purport to plug gaps in the data:
> And further: Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
> The results are fine resolution, highly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.
> Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively."
Can you explain to me what their methodology is? Because this is just marketing-speak and doesn't provide any facts about how or why their analysis is accurate.
---
Edit: from their own site!
> Q. Why rank cities on safety even though the FBI cautions against it?
> A. This report and/or our data cannot and should not be used as a measure of the effectiveness of law enforcement due to the myriad factors that can contribute to crime in a community.
You can generally assume most statistics posted within any comment on any site are misleading, and to use that cynicism to assess the "numbers".
Just how it is on the internet, most people who post the "numbers" are doing so for a very specific intention, and it's not at all to highlight the objectivity of them. You'll want to get the source research yourself and see what they say about it, and usually most papers tend to be far more nuanced than "thing bad" or "thing good".
The numbers might not be 100% accurate (as other commenter mentioned, there is no normalized dataset available) but they show an approximate scale.
It seems though that some Bay located HN readers disagree with both statistical and anecdotal evidence, which might be actually an example of sunken cost bias (it's not surprising considering the cost of property in SF / Bay Area)
If the claim of the former commissioner spraying people with bear mace is true then it is hardly a random attack but an escalation of violence after being attacked by a chemical weapon.
Yes, violence against homeless people is not only an under-reported phenomenon, its link to inciting further violence and crime is also under-reported. Thank you for highlighting it, if a little indirectly.
There is some relief in learning that a homeless person didn't commit this crime. However, the overall crime situation in SF, and other parts of the Bay, is still crazy... and I think that is the genesis of the 2600+ comment thread on the crime and homeless situation. SF crime IS A PROBLEM that is not being adequately addressed. So much so that folks assumed Bob was probably killed by a crazy drug addict or something. While wrong in this case, it was a reasonable first guess. And the conversation and flood of comment on the topic of crime flooded in from there.
The subject is violent crime. Don't cite a page that lumps property crimes in. Might want to look at some relevant data; https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-rate-bob-lee-sf-vio... has a handy chart halfway down, if you're not interested in reading.
I understand (believe me, it's in my bones) how hard it is not to lash back at people who resort to snark and swipes when they don't like what you're arguing on the internet—and how it's a thousand times harder when an impromptu mob is ganging up on you (or it feels like one is). But please don't cross the line yourself.
It's certainly true that people should never jump on a story to promote their own ideological concerns (e.g. San Francisco is pretty unsafe at night in many places), when the details of the story are unknown.
However, homicide stats don't tell the whole story about a city. There are many areas in SF where a resident would never go at night (or often during the day) because of the large numbers of drug addicts and homeless people. This means businesses in those areas have a hard time surviving. In terms of property crimes (in which violent assault is not involved) SF is leading the pack, at least in the top five. The lower rate of homicide is probably also linked to California's stricter gun laws compared to Texas and Florida, and also, many homicide victims are homeless, see LA:
The only plausible long-term solution is improved housing, more jobs, public health care, better education etc. This would require expenditure of public funds on a national scale (you can't fix this city by city, or state by state, because people migrate), i.e. increased taxes on the wealthy and a redistribution of military-industrial spending to domestic infrastructure of various sorts.
Worth keeping in mind next time something comes along that might confirm your priors.
(Edit: notable that the thread linked above had _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]. I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"? )