San Francisco has disgustedly and unfortunately became a third-world country.
It's your poor and middle class who do not have the means to deal with the crime who suffer the crime brought on by opportunistic criminals. Mundane examples are people have had their third and fourth catalytic converters stolen. It may not be a lot of money to you, but for your average worker, it's a day or two of inconvenience and a few hundred each time --money that now has to be reallocated.
The few possesions we had were taken. The most unfortunate was my wife's grandmather's wedding band. It probably wouldn't have fetched more than 20 or 30 bucks, but given that it was a family heirloom from WWII-wrought Finland, the sentimental value was high.
Being white and working for the government in a predominantly minority area, I'm sure I was stereotyped as being able to handle some abuse (in fact my neighboor informed me so). Fortunately we didn't own anything of serious financial value, but having your personal space violated by petty theives is not a pleasant experience.
By that measure the us seems to be the most violent it’s been in 25 years, roughly equivalent to 1997.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...
Do you think that people in healthy relationships should fear that outcome? Do you think people should become celibate because some percentages of relationships end up that way? The point is you are encouraging living in fear of low likelihood events.
The world is not perfect, crime and poverty exist, as do disease, many types of suffering, it's bad, but we don't need to be afraid and motivated by irrational fear.
There are lots of things that were statistically demonstrably worse in the past and also statistically miniscule in occurrence, but I think you would get righteously clobbered if you proposed defending their current rate of occurrence as acceptable. Lots of things.
There are outliers to that. I think medical research for something like a rare disease is a good one. High cost, and by some metrics, low payout, but worthy. I don't think this recent right wing paranoia about crime is a good example. Especially since the "tough on crime" policies that people want to enact in reaction to it do not work and have a tendency to incarcerate innocent and undeserving people as collateral damage.
One small anecdote, the first year or two I got here, I felt I was being sized up for muggings a couple times. Has not happened in a long time.
Let's say x% of crimes are reported. This would mean the stats are not an accurate count. But a huge enough spike in crime, like the phantom ones I see claimed in fear mongering internet threads, would not evade some number of them being reported.
The cops will absolutely NOT say that to you in SF. They know the report is necessary for your insurance claim. They will do it for you. They will recommend it.
I would suggest to you that you don't simply guess what happens in the world due to preconceived notions and instead listen to people and ask questions.
The people attacked in these reports are photographers helping people at their weddings. Are those people disconnected, entitled people who need to be violently robbed to teach them a lesson or something?
How about blaming the people who do wrong? That’s a novel thought. Or maybe even stretch and blame the people whose entire job is catching and punishing the small number of people who are ruining things for normal people.
There are plenty of places all over the earth full of wealthy entitled people who do not have such violence problems. Eg Geneva is approximately as boring as SF, but certainly doesn't have the crime.
Republicans. San Francisco just needs more liberal representation.
Illegal drug suppliers, as they keep the vulnerable population (born poor and/or not educated) within the vicious circle of being too high on drugs to perform any decent type of work. This in turn reduces their income and increases their social risk at the same time. The root causes to this problem are far from the reach of local government, and this explains why the problem looks/feels unsolvable.
Left-wing policies enacted by left-wing city governments.
Maybe that's my foreign view as I don't see any political stance in the USA as left-leaning, some Democrats are, at most, left-adjacent in some social policies.
Protecting their turfs and their own is quite common across both sides of the spectrum.
'left wing policies' are typically social safety nets (healthcare, housing etc). You're describing failed government, left or right.
It also has driven out big tech with with idiotic policies and taxes. Remember the anti-Uber law? The Twitter tax?
And there's plenty of big tech still here, more than enough, really. Idiotic policies, sure, sometimes, however, the taxes are probably still too low.
But no, actually, I don't remember the anti-Uber law. nor the Twitter tax. It's amusing that you'd cite two made up things to support your case.
Are you referring to the Prop 22 that Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, and Instacart spent $224 million to enshrine their mistreatment of workers into the California Constitution? (kinda crazy that they couldn't just use that money to pay the workers better, huh?) But I'm not sure if a law could really be anti-Uber as their whole strategy was just to flout the law, screw regulations, and blast through billions while playing a game of chicken with Lyft.
And maybe you weren't here at the time, but it was the Twitter Tax Break. That's what started the whole mess anyway, puppet Mayor Ed Lee wanting to kiss Ron Conway's ass.
A law so incredibly inept that had to be amended to exclude any other part-time employees, from musicians and designers to writers and journalists, remaining in the end what was clearly from the beginning: an anti-high-tech law.
A law so evil no actual gig worker supported (voting Prop 22 instead) because it obviously gave them less options and money and more paperwork. But a huge cash grab for the state and the unions who could tax and control yet another avenue left us to make some money. Because nothing annoys leftists more than independent people, people who just want to be left alone to work and live and don't need them and their f-ing "favors".
And finally, I was in SF before Twitter even existed. But I left, a long time ago, seeing clearly where thing were heading. And it looks I was quite right... what a mess.
Yes.
But the conservative tough on crime folks are completely unable to come to terms with the consequences of their actions on society. So we end up with a stalemate where liberals are trying to trim down the prison population and focus on violent crime while most conservatives still want to fix the problem by getting tough and imprisoning more people for longer.
The conservative tough on crime policies may have been inhumane or even immoral, but they did reduce crime.
The soft on crime policies have allowed increased crime. Here are US murder rates:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...
Interestingly, Florida refuses [1] to even allow a vote on whether you can force prisoners to work (unlike 20 other states [2]):
"Died in Criminal Justice & Public Safety Subcommittee"
1. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/39
2. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
You can find similar stories for every congressional term and presidential administration going back decades.
The only stat that is reliable is murder. And murder is way up, not 90s level, but way up.
Meanwhile the non-policing of property crimes is a completely new phenomenon, so I don’t know if we’ve even seen this much shoplifting, public defecation, window smashing, etc.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...
Crime has gone way up recently, so bad that it is similar to 1997. 1998 and 1999 had lower crime than now.
This is at minimum a bad trend, and 1997-level crime is not great.
This says 2021 was lower than 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
Maybe the trend will reverse, but there is zero evidence of this and, again, all one has to do is live here.
I’ve lived in NYC since 1985. I know what it looks and feels like at different crime levels.
I try to have a discussion about what the numbers are showing, and you essentially tell me you don't care because your intuitive feeling overrides the numbers.
New York had fewer murders in 2020 than it did in 2010.
The national trend shows crime decreasing in 2021. I haven't looked at the New York specific data, or preliminary 2022 numbers, but that is the national trend for 2021.
I'm in San Francisco and I have to say that all of the rhetoric on this topic regarding this city is pretty heavy on bullshit. Your governor just said "we will never become San Francisco", so if that's the yardstick for terrible, I've got to say that New York is probably doing all right. But I haven't visited since 2021 so I cannot say. None of my friends there are telling me about an out of control crime situation.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-a...
I'll say again: New York had fewer murders in 2020 than it did in 2010.