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Comment by BurritoAlPastor | Hacker News Reader

What crime? I’ve got complaints about living in SF, but it’s basically crime-free from my experiences.

My car was broken into multiple times, stolen a few times (I used tickets to find it because the cops wouldn't take even the basic step of matching parking tickets with stolen car reports).

I worked in the tenderloin - so plenty of open air drug dealing (not a huge problem) as well as random attacks on people (a problem). My roommate was jumped and beaten near our place - very disruptive to his life in general.

I actually caught folks who had stolen my car, good response by police, got them in the car too driving it. I asked, if I pressed charges, what's the consequence. A few days in jail if I was lucky and wanted to spend years pursuing the case - these would be guys who I'd then have a beef with in my neighborhood.

I didn't carry a gun or knife and just didn't want to beef with the dudes hanging out. At some point you are like, is this worth it? As you get older, have kids - you just want to let you kid play. Where I am now the kids can play on their own with neighbors on the street - no worries. Much nicer in my view.

And here I am living in one of the places that most of the SF tech crowd would consider synonymous with "failed rust belt shithole" where none of that stuff happens at any appreciable scale.

Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g. running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc.

I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.

Sounds like parts of just about every big city.

Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.

Year round fair weather is a public policy?

Not building enough shelters and allowing NIMBYism at local levels is public policy: https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...

I have never experienced anything like this living on the east coast (NYC/Boston)

Got off BART at Civic Center station at about 11:00 AM last Saturday. Walked past two guy sprawled in a hallway in the station smoking heroin or something from a piece of tin foil, and past another one doing the same as I climbed the stairs to the street. At the top of the stairs were a handful of guys gathered around a stereo smoking weed and, based on what I was seeing, selling it too. A few minutes later, just as I passed the tent city near City Hall, I ran into another guy torching something on a sheet of tin foil.

More shit than I've ever seen on any city streets. Every doorway, tree, and wall reeks of piss. It's no way to live.

All of what you mentioned is a reason why I only ride 1 station by BART and rest by Caltrain.

"but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving" ...things I've also seen in Chicago, NYC, Miami, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Portland (among others).

Not saying that's ok, just that SF is hardly unique in that regard.

I think it's really easy how normalized a person can get to petty crime. Like a frog in boiling water. You'll talk to people in SF who totally brush off smash-and-grabs. They'll say something like "stupid me, shouldn't have left my AirPods visible in the center console." You don't even realize that it's not normal to have to worry about stuff like that.

It is normal to worry about smash and grabs in every US urban area I've ever lived in or visited.

San Francisco has the worst property crime rate of any major city in America.[1] It's more than three times worse than what you'd find in New York, Boston or San Diego. It's even about twice as bad as Austin, Chicago or Philadelphia, which aren't exactly known as low crime cities. Moreover the discrepancy is likely understated since so much property crime goes unreported in SF.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Between all my bike thefts, car thefts, window break ins etc- I reported only car theft. Crime is widely understated in SF. People will step over a dying person in SF.

It's not just street crime, either. The first building I lived in had its bike lockers broken into by a pro crew in masks, and tens of thousands of dollars of bikes stolen. I also forgot to mention the man screaming at the top of his lungs at a woman waiting for a bus, the coworker who fought off an attempted mugging, coming back to my car (probably at Lands End) to find one of the screws missing from the license plate, and other stuff I only heard about rather than saw.

Based on this thread, there's a lot going on that people are lucky enough not to notice, or choose not to notice, but it definitely makes SF a risky choice for businesses. I probably fared as well as I did because I'm tall and didn't go out much without other people with me.

But ABQ still wins if you drop the "major" qualification.

Sigh. NM, c'mon, we can do better. Can't we?

I never felt as unsafe in any part of Albuquerque, living there for 5 years, as I do during a visit to pretty much any part of SF.

It beats Baltimore and Chicago by a mile. Those cities are known for bad crime.

You can't directly compare SF to Chicago (I've lived in both).

Chicago is still a very segregated city, and the north side is relatively safe. San Francisco is small, and while the problem areas concentrate around Civic Center / Tenderloin / SOMA, literally everything else is in walking distance, so petty property crime is quite widespread.

It's especially hilarious how this type of people gets offended when people are victim blaming victims of different kinds of crimes and when it comes to property crime around SF it's "oh, you idiot, never leave anything in the car".

1. Two people with knives tried to mug my father. Chinatown. 2. Two people tried to mug me. Nob Hill. 3. Car was broken into. Model airplane was taken. Just off Van Ness. 4. Mother had her purse slashed. Chinatown. 5. Brother in law had his bike stolen. He locked it in front of the Exploratorium. 6. One brother had his car stolen (but this was Oakland). 7. Roommate got hit on the head, knocked out, had stuff taken. This was late at night a few blocks from the Haight.

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