But if you show the video of someone robbing a convenience store (in oakland! another city entirely!) enough times on loop, you can convince enough voters that Something Must Be Done.
I can name roughly 10 people in my life who said they didn’t bother. Another 5 who went to police only to be told by them that there was nothing that would happen and that they shouldn’t waste time on finishing the paperwork. To complete the data, I know only 1 person who fully reported a crime, and it was an extreme violent crime.
The second hand testimony from residents and business owners saying the police are telling them not to expect them to be able to prosecute anyone.
But there's also the evidence of what Boudin openly said and advocated. Sometimes the message and the stated intent are worth replacing regardless of how effective they've been at their goals.
The rising crime narrative is entirely an artifact of the pandemic causing historically low crim because for like 8 months no one did anything.
I'm not sure about SF in particular, but my account was for the US as a whole.
> Murder and shootings are comparable with 2018.
This is incorrect. SF homicides:
Year | Homicides
-----+----------
2018 | 44
2019 | 41
2020 | 48
2021 | 56
> The rising crime narrative is entirely an artifact of the pandemic causing historically low crim because for like 8 months no one did anything.
Again, I'm not sure about SF in particular, but nationally the "rising crime narrative" is entirely an artifact of soaring crime, especially violent crimes. For example, homicides have been falling for decades, and then the trend abruptly reversed around 2014. Criminologists have identified specific reversals in cities that experienced large BLM protests immediately following those protests, and this is all pre-pandemic data (the 2020 and 2021 data is still being compiled and analyzed as far as I know).
For example (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...):
> For investigations that were not preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
And in 2022 we're on track for somewhere between 40 and 48, precisely in line with prior years. A single outlier year does not a trend make.
> and then the trend abruptly reversed around 2014
Until 2016, when it began dropping again, and then it jumped up a ton in 2020 but we don't really have data yet to know if that was a fluke or not. (it really looks like the 2014 thing was just regression to the mean).
I didn't claim a trend in SF homicides, I was responding to your claim that 2021 homicides are at the same level as 2018.
> Until 2016, when it began dropping again, and then it jumped up a ton in 2020 but we don't really have data yet to know if that was a fluke or not. (it really looks like the 2014 thing was just regression to the mean).
The post-2020 "spike" (is it a spike if it hasn't come back down abruptly/dramatically?) has persisted for 2 years. Researchers insist the ~2014 surge was not a fluke or a blip, and the 2020-2022 "spike" is much more dramatic.
> “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-eff...
And researchers disagree that the 2014 surge was merely a regression to the mean. From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-eff...:
> While it’s not clear what drove the increases, he said, he believes there is some connection between high-profile protests over police killings of unarmed black men, a further breakdown in black citizens’ trust of the police, and an increase in community violence.
> “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.
> “That led me to conclude, preliminarily, that something like a Ferguson effect was responsible for the increase,” he said.
From https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...:
> Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests. Campbell’s research does not include the effects of last summer’s historic wave of protests because researchers do not yet have all the relevant data. ... His research on homicides aligns with other evidence. Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University who has done seminal research on the effect of protests, told Vox that the results are “entirely plausible” and “not surprising,” considering existing protest research.
Note also the aforementioned paper (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...) from famed Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi which found an increase in violent crime rate in cities that experienced a prominent BLM shooting (and subsequent protests), resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing.
We'll have to wait for the 2020 and 2021 data to understand that spike; however, it seems really unlikely that prior to 2020 homicides were driven by anti-policing protests, but afterward it's merely a coincidence that the largest homicide surge immediately followed the largest bout of anti-policing protests.
To give you an analogy that might help, high covid infection numbers are bad always, but low covid numbers can be either good (if the covid numbers are truly down) or bad (if the real numbers are just not being tracked properly/swept under the rug, and people are just not getting tested enough).
But to give a direct answer to your original question, yes, low crime numbers are bad when they are the result of prosecution and enforcement not doing their job, as opposed to being the result of crime actually going down.
Lies, damn lies and statistics is still applicable and relevant today, if conveniently forgotten.
Just to bring something else to this discussion, Chesa didn’t run on statistics. He ran on a soft-on-crime message and delivered. Since this is an elected office, he didn’t answer to the Mayor, so he didn’t benefit from the Mayor’s cover but also wasn’t in the same chain of command as SFPD, so when the voters turned, they turned directly on him and this being an elected office, he just didn’t have a good story to tell or the support he needed from the communities he needed it from. The real statistics don’t even matter at that point because statistics don’t run for office or win elections.
The answer is it depends on the context.
Cites statistics.
Crime is visibly exploding, the police are only recording the most heinous/obvious incidents, and then we're told that crime is down.
When the paperwork is filled in, we have reported crime (because the police take a police report) and we have convictions (how many people were convicted is a matter of public record since courts are open). What we don’t have is a paper trail for all the crime that isn’t reported or when the paperwork isn’t filled out.
What can a third party bring to the table that the paper records cannot?
Also, Seattle has a Find-It-Fix-It app that allows people to report various things that are broken with the city, opening up that data to the public would be great. I know it's not crime-related, but getting an overall sense of the health of the city seems correlated. This would require that the app be administered by a 3rd party though.
I can’t say I particularly like it though. I do care about suppressing crime, but not to the point of becoming a police state. That ship may have already sailed between both existing apps like the ones you listed and the prevalence of home security cameras, so I’ll say it’s at least worth considering.
> Seattle has a Find-It-Fix-It app
Is this like SF’s 311?
I think the one thing with the data is how much crime it takes to make a neighborhood feel unsafe. And my hypothesis is that the threshold is very, very low. Like double digits low. It doesn’t take much to rattle the psyche of a community.
But sure. Crime falls by 40% during a DA’s tenure (hypothetical example) so all is well right? But what is the absolute number and what does that absolute number translate to in the real world?
Given the degree to which opposition to Boudin comes from other progressive Democrats, including politicians, in SF, the article we are discussing about a “message” to “Democrats and the nation” is an example of that.
There you go the clear graph: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/06/05/why-san-f...