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?
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.