Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco

https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/video-appears-to-sho...

"Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge.....Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.

Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again ....

At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital....

Lee was unconscious when officers found him on the ground, police said."

So looks like he was stabbed and he was wandering around in the middle of San Fran trying to get someone to help him even lifting up his shirt to show people his wound and no one would help him..

The reason our large cities are hellscapes is because in part all institutions censor dissenting comments.. cough cough cough cough...

If I say that everyone should have a means of self-defense in their own house, I get down voted. If I say I don't leave the house without a handgun, I'd probably get flagged.

Liberals made their bed, now its time to lie in it.

The remarkable thing about SF and Seattle, is that crime is highest in high desirability/high-foot-fall areas. Many folks I know all go to downtown SF/Oakland/Seattle for work, drinks, dinner, concerts and public events.

At the same time, it seems impossible to park your car on the street in any of these neighborhoods. I thought it was an exaggeration, but "every" person I know, who has parked their car for a week in one of these neighborhoods, has had their cars broken in. It's shocking.

On the other hand, the high-footfall / popular parts of east coast cities are fairly safe. (Pickpockets are an exception). For better or for worse, a person would never accidentally find themselves in a bad neighborhood in NYC, Boston or DC. (Bad neighborhoods aren't always correlated with race or poverty. Sometimes it's just a self fulfilling prophecy) This means that violent crime on the east-coast has very little spill-over outside the communities ravaged by it. IE. The average stranger is safe.

In that sense, west coast's 'open drug market in the most important parts of the city' policy is a uniquely west coast problem. It really doesn't affect other cities in the US or elsewhere in the same way. The unique incompetence of west coast politics is squarely to blame for the dilapidation of their cities. This is not endemic to cities at large, and cities around the world should actively distance themselves from the sort of accusations that get flung at 'all cities', when it is meant to be targeting west-coast cities in particular.

SF has 4X the murder rate of Toronto, for example. (And Toronto has about the same murder rate as London, and less than Amsterdam — I can't find the comparative stat for Munich though)

As for the violent crime, I expect post-2019 data to be much worse than 2019, 2019 was before the whole "defund the police" movement.

What the majority of people are concerned about is the chances of violent crime that is likely to affect them. Yes, there might be 80 gang murders a year in Atlanta but a $100k+ income working professional in downtown has a very different threat model than a gang member in some of the worst neighborhoods of the city.

I think the reason SF gets so much negative attention is because the threat to "average people" (realistically, above average income people) is anecdotally quite high in SF, even in "nice" areas of the city where affluent people frequent.

And this is what gives a chance for extremist to flourish. For some reasons, US politics has no centre, it’s always far away from the axis. I think it’s time to have a “Balance Party” in the US :)

In my view the main problem is not the politicians but the ineffective opaque police that does not have to produce any metrics and is not subject to any kind of oversight, not in SF and not anywhere else either.

For example, I had a car window smashed not in SF but in Fremont, and when I went to the police, they informed me that that is not even an arrestable offense. Window was smashed in front of a hotel with a prominent security camera overlooking the street. The police told me they left a voicemail with the hotel asking if their camera caught anything. The hotel never returned the police voicemail, the police never bothered to follow-up with the hotel, and told me they don't have authority to take the security footage of the public street without hotel's consent. Some time later I noticed that the hotel removed that street-facing security camera they had, leaving just an empty pole.

I wrote a letter to the Fremont city council regarding their police not wanting to work and lying to victims of crime. And that's when I got back some police action -- in the form of a mental Fremont PD police sergeant calling me in the morning to harass me and bitch about my letter.

So even if SF is bad, outside SF it is not much better. Another nugget to consider is that back in 2014, back when crime was nowhere as bad as today, CA voters, not liberal politicians, voted for Proposition 47 "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" which made potential felonies chargeable only as misdemeanors.

Fact: the last 4 out of 7 friends I had that got their car broken into didn't bother reporting. They just fixed their car and went about their life.

This is known as the “dark figure of crime” btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_figure_of_crime

What makes Austin shine, and SF not ?

Don't national issues affect everyone more or less equally ? And even if they didn't, why is it that the outcomes are so wildly different between SFO and comparable large cities that have huge net inflows of people ?

I know SF already spends 100k/yr per homeless resident, but we really need to push that up."

This whole line of thought is absurd, you're in a bubble.

Even if you solve housing (NIMBYism, slow permitting process, low-density zoning) crime won't solve itself. (Because organized crime fits in its niche, and doesn't want to give it up. And it'd require changes of federal law to move it.)

Umm... European cities do have high wealth disparity. Checkout an ethnic ghetto the next time you're in Manchester or Paris, for example... there are areas of these cities that get scary AF after dark.

Homelessness is not a crime... but the homeless and drug addicted commit a lot of crimes. And they (particularly the drug addicted) frequently have very little to lose and very severe motivators to rob, mug, etc. As others have said, not policing crime is recipe for disaster, chaos, and tragedy. And it is a human tragedy: for the people who are suffering homelessness, drug addiction; the people within those domains who are victims of violent crime, and for society at large.

A lot of homeless people in CA were not born in CA... and a lot of them didn't hit the street in CA... they migrated to the west coast. Drug addicted homeless people flock to SF and LA because (1) the weather is better than many places in the country, (2) the extremely lax policing, (3) availability of drugs, and (4) the social support system: food, shelter, clothes, money. Indulging depravity is not a solution.

SF needs to double/triple police presence, prosecute crime, and significantly increase drug and mental health services.

I was born in SF, lived there off and on for many years, and have family who still live in the Bay Area... parts of SF are just disgusting now (human feces and trash all over place)... parts of Oakland and Berkeley are no better. Parts of Oakland have so much broken safety glass on the street it's a glass/gravel road.

I used walk around SF late at night as little as 10 years ago; now, there are so many places in SF that I would not walk around in after dark unless I had no other choice. This is coming from a white dude who used to play basketball at playgrounds in South Central LA on saturday nights in the late 90's (because the pick-up basketball was that good).

Until you live somewhere else, you may not understand just how bad and crazy the situation in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles really is. Where I live now, I can leave thousands of dollars of stuff in my car in pain sight and nothing gets stolen... ever. My neighbors' kids leave their bikes on their front lawn overnight and they are still there days later.

I once saw a person break into a Telsa on Piedmont Ave. in Oakland at 2pm on Saturday in front of about 50 people to snatch a backpack. WTF?

Lots of places have poverty, not all of them have the level of crime that SF has

Whatever the fix for institutional racism is need not be contradictory to Broken Window. They can work together.

> The policy targeted people in areas with a significant amount of physical disorder and there appeared to be a causal relationship between the adoption of broken windows policing and the decrease in crime rate. Sridhar, however, discusses other trends (such as New York City's economic boom in the late 1990s) that created a "perfect storm" that contributed to the decrease of crime rate much more significantly than the application of the broken windows policy. Sridhar also compares this decrease of crime rate with other major cities that adopted other various policies and determined that the broken windows policy is not as effective.

> In a 2007 study called "Reefer Madness" in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, Harcourt and Ludwig found further evidence confirming that mean reversion fully explained the changes in crime rates in the different precincts in New York in the 1990s.[38] Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic,[39] unrelated growth in the prison population by the Rockefeller drug laws,[39] and that the number of males from 16 to 24 was dropping regardless of the shape of the US population pyramid.

As always, the wikipedia article is a good place to start to look into further sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

It's time to let "broken window theory," and bloodthirsty, punitive "justice" strategies, die.

I still think we need more cops. We lag behind Europe in cops per capita, and have higher crime rates.

The idea that we should stop prosecuting crimes because it affects one type of citizen or another is ridiculous for a ton of reasons, but specially because of this: minorities are more likely to be in the receiving end of a crime.

We can do both invest in the social aspect to level the playing field and prosecute crime wherever it manifests.

If the laws are bad, fix them. If the police are too brutal, curtail them.

This is the only path towards with a healthy society. This isn't always easy, and sometimes it seems impossible. However, sanctioning lawlessness and giving up on reform is no solution. It is a race to the bottom, and hurts minorities even more. If you think building towards equality is hard, imagine how much harder it is when theft, rape, and murder is rampant in your community.

This is represented in the opinions and surveys of minority communities. People want less bias and police brutality, but they also want more police on the streets and more enforcement of laws.

> In April [2022], [...] the dept issued 338 tickets for traffic violations. By comparison, in April 2014, the year Vision Zero began, the department issued 11,612 tickets.

Does that mean nobody violates traffic laws in SF anymore? Of course not. But if the tickets aren't issued they're not rolled up into stats. Same with all sorts of violent and property crime.

When I lived in the mid-mission a few years ago I had to call in a shooting that happened outside my bedroom window. There were a ton of violent altercations between pimps and prostitutes that were just straight-up ignored. And 24th St became an open-air Walgreens.

> The letter highlighted alarming data backing up many residents’ concerns that police have thrown up their hands. For example, last year the Department of Police Accountability opened 595 cases into alleged police wrongdoing; the largest share by far, 42.6%, related to “neglect of duty.” That percentage has ticked up steadily since 2016, when neglect of duty made up 32% of complaints. [1]

[edit] Your own source seems to back that up. Your source is for all of California, not SF. And one of the big sub-headings is "crime rates vary dramatically by region and category" and specifically calls out SF as having an outsized quantity of property crime.

> The state’s highest rate of violent crime was in the San Joaquin Valley, which had 640 violent incidents per 100,000 residents. The highest rate of property crime was in the San Francisco Bay Area, at 2,718 per 100,000 residents.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

How do you square this statement with gentrification? Feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation...

Really?

> police budgets have gone up rather than down.

And what do you think the police are supposed to do when the prosecutions by the DA fall off a cliff? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, if the number of cops remains unchanged, but the percentage of criminals they detain being arraigned/charged/arrested drops, that maybe, just maybe, crime will go up?

The cognitive dissonance is just unbelievable here.

You have your dates and anecdotes off. The crack epidemic was in the 1980s, not the 1990s. There was, however, always a serious heroin trade in that area. After the gang truce in 1992, the Mission was incredibly safe and a great place to live. Going to the bars after work and spilling out into the streets after 2 am was a safe and peaceful affair. Further, a lot of the property crime that people are complaining about has nothing to do with locals; it was perpetrated by organized gangs from outside the city. This is still true today and several investigative news articles on this phenomenon have been published recently. The Mission was never a "no go" area by people who lived in the city. It was an incredibly vibrant place to live and work, with great bars, restaurants, stores, and culture. In many ways, the Mission is the heart of San Francisco given its centralized location and history. For anyone to describe it as a no go area reveals that they never lived there and know nothing about it. That all changed when the tech bros moved out from the Midwest and East coast and chased all the artists out of the city. These people who were forced out were the people who actually cared about their communities and helped each other out and were the spirit and life blood of what the city was in its heart and soul. Now the new blood doesn’t like the new city they helped create, but of course, it’s always someone else’s fault.

You own data suggests otherwise

https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/

The peak in violent crime was the 90s. The peak of property crime was 80s, and there were 40 years of crime decline at the exact same time wealth disparity was growing. What changed recently was the new lax attitude on crime, decarceration, and hated towards the police.

Truth is, San Francisco did not follow the pattern of the rest of CA and saw rising murders through the 2000's. It finally declined in 2009 after a huge federal and local crackdown on gangs and MS13 in San Francisco.

Indeed, I hate when wealth disparity breaks into my car.

> Growing up in highly orderly, safe environments, they completely take order for granted.

Do you have evidence for their background and reasoning?

Much of 'order' is often abusing politically vulnerable people, which provides 'order' for the wealthy white population, but not for others.

This doesn't get into any context or whether anyone died as a result, but from the available data, the highest number of incidents where someone was shot by police in SF was 11 in 2010, the lowest number was 2 in 2021.

For the record, that isn’t true, it’s where they set the threshold for a crime being treated as a high class of misdemeanor or felony (I can’t remember which) and how stiff the sentence is. I live in AZ and our dollar amount threshold for the same types of crime are actually higher than California’s but no one tries to say that you can “walk out of a CVS with $X and there’s no penalty” because some people are just looking to tear down CA, not actually discuss policy and it’s impacts.

This is not a meaningful metric because the daytime population is a lot higher. Many of the crime victims are not SF residents, and most of the criminals are not SF residents either.

This is not the case in NYC, which has a lot of commuters between boroughs.

Then why is the PD of every single major American city dramatically understaffed?

I agree the SFPD’s lack of cooperation and inaction is a central issue that needs addressing by cleaning house and rebuilding. The leftist proposal (often shorthanded to “abolish the police”) would say wipe away the current structure that answers to no one built for antagonism and punishment and replace it with a service bound to strong community oversight tasked with protection, aid, and rehabilitation.

That idea may be the literal scientifically perfect solution to crime or an impossibly impractical utopian fantasy but we’ll never know from SF’s vague motions. Appointing Boudin DA so he could reduce charges and lessen punishments without making corresponding changes in the police force to focus on community outreach and aid services was never a real attempt that could be judged, and was hamstrung from the beginning in a way that could only result in failure.

But even if you think real try at that proposal would never work and the correct solution for addressing crime in SF is something very different the same type of failure is guaranteed if the city doesn’t address the point you made. If the police refuse to act in accordance with the wishes of the community and aren’t replaced with people who will the city will never have a cohesively focused law enforcement strategy that any approach requires to have a chance at succeeded.

The homelessness issue is the exact same thing with SF continuing to be afraid to commit to anything more than half measures regardless of costs. The city has a homeless population of around 8-10 thousand and spends around $1.1b a year on services. Over $100k per person, a bit more than the average income in the city, how does that make any sense? Providing every homeless person an apartment, free food, healthcare, drug rehabilitation, and job search services would very likely cost less and actually solve the issue. Like yes that's a massive simplification and not actually workable in the current world, especially without the rest of the country providing similar services, but it approximates an actual plan with singular direction and the numbers involved highlight demonstrate the problem.

San Francisco really wants to be seen as progressive on homelessness so it keeps throwing large amounts of money at one-off half-baked projects like $5k a month per person on tent spaces in parking lots to prevent COVID spread in the homeless or $70k a year to fund new beds in shelters the homeless can only sleep in at night or $1.7m to build a single public toilet.

At the same time it really wants it to seem like its listening to its tax payers and taking action with visible effect so it also tosses however many millions on encampment sweeps, building hostile architecture, and having law enforcement harass or temporarily arrest the homeless all of which just results in the homeless moving somewhere else a few blocks away.

So it ends up wasting this extraordinary amount of money and effort doing a whole bunch of nothing instead of you know, actually getting the homeless off the street. Because that would require establishing a goal with measurable criteria, forming a comprehensive plan to accomplish it, and working as a cohesive public body to make it happen.

I really rambling here but I feel like pretty much every single issue in San Francisco stems from this same problem. The city and its government is terrified of doing anything that requires the integrity to build a concrete project that it could be judged by, in whichever political direction, and so it keeps creating a giant mismatch of conflicting partial measures it can parade around as progress to counter criticism and avoid quantifiable failure while never actually making any forward movement. See everything with the schools or the cost of living or public transit or other infrastructure or a million other things for even more examples of this.

As long as SF continues to half-ass everything and avoid commitment nothing is going to change.

“Just part & parcel of living in a _big city_.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3801018/Terror-atta...

Are you shying away from discussing politics whenever there is a school shooting as well?

Do you think it would have been better to ask a few questions before resorting to shame as a tactic to change someone's behavior?

(See what I did there?)

"With a crime rate of 54 per one thousand residents, San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18. Within California, more than 98% of the communities have a lower crime rate than San Francisco."

Incidentally, only a small fraction of HN users (10% or so, last I checked) are anywhere near SV. HN is an international forum, which is why we get regional and nationalistic flamewars to begin with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nice anecdote. Have you heard the one about the tech CTO that got stabbed to death? We have data about this too and it's very much trending in the wrong direction.

If you're tired of arguing with people who are begging you to care about their lives, you can always just remain silent.

But I do not feel safe at all. What do your kids and grandkids say about SF? Maybe that is generational - I’m in 50s.

Please don't. This is not safe, even if you have managed not to be a victim so far.

Not commenting on the current DA's performance yet, but even "good changes" take time. SF didn't get this way overnight.

Outside the US, maybe.

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).

On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.

Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."

If everyone in a country feels valuable and equitable coming up with solutions that benefit everyone is very easy. As it stands in the US there will always be someone that sees themselves losing something and prevents any improvement.

It is far from proven that "broken windows policing" is effective, and in fact there is much evidence to the contrary. See, for instance, the peer-reviewed meta-analyses described here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...

The area where this man died is known as Rincon Hill and is dominated by tech offices, Sweetgreens, and luxury highrise apartment buildings and is basically dead after 8pm every day of the week. I lived a block away from where this man was stabbed for a month and it felt safe and dead quiet once all the tech workers go home.

e: Also, sorry, it's ridiculous to say the US looks to Europe too much when discussing policy. This almost never happens, and when it does it's from the left, who has 0 actual influence. Every policy discussion should begin by talking about prior art & what we've observed about the effectiveness of policies as implemented elsewhere. It'll never show causality, but it'll start the discussion off with some possible causal links to explore w/ our own policy experiments!

Simply to remain more anonymous.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268504/homicide-rate-eu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Even Istanbul, which is a 15M population city in a country with serious economic turmoil and and has huge number of refugees and illegal immigrants from war torn countries, is much batter than most of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

During the civil war in Lebanon in eighties it was safer there than in modern US.

And of course it all depends on many factors, but I know for a fact that not all of Paris is safe, or all of Berlin. You have your bad apples everywhere.

Doesn't have to be. Almost all (if not all) European cities have much lower homicide rates. To the tune of multiple times lower.

When it's about homicide rates, it kinda is though.

> Different areas also have different problems.

It's rarely violence at the level you see in an American city.

> It's like the whole talk about "walkable cities" or healthcare.

Yeah, I feel it for you, but it's mostly true. With rare exceptions.

While in the US it's mostly false, with rare exceptions.

Turns out, shockingly to me at least, that the US also has a much higher deaths due to stabbing rate than the UK.

0.60/100k residents in the US vs 0.08/100k residents in the UK.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-...

That’s almost an entire order of magnitude. And on top of that you add the many order of magnitudes greater homicides in the US thanks to firearms.

By "it sounds weird" you actually mean "in the past few years there's been a movement to hyperfocus on this small language quirk that nobody really cared about in the past". Just so we're clear.

Honestly, it's all about context and really the people say "oh he used female workers instead of women workers" what a pig are the people who are going to be mad no matter what they're literally just looking for an excuse.

And quite simply I find that demonisation of the word female to be rude and fundamentally sexist. We wouldn't have a problem saying "two males walking around" but in escence you would have a problem with "two females walking around". The fact being female is considered dehumanisng is a problem in itself and sexist. Being male is not dehumanising. See how that got turned around? You had good intentions then I got mad and used your words againist you.

If you or anyone else didn't know, consider a police report or a research paper in which the language is deliberately distant to avoid biasing the reader: "The two female victims were struck by the SUV, and the male suspect fled on foot", "we observed higher rates of CVD for males in the treatment group, but in females the effect size was not significant", and equally bloodless language. This may be dehumanising in some sense, but it's done in a benign way to help the reader be objective.

It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.

Stating that you’ve got information that CLEARLY everyone else needs to be taught; that you’re just trying to be helpful; that nobody should feel pressured to conform “immediately”; all comes off as disingenuous at best and threatening at worst. Instead, try asking questions and engaging in conversation rather than lecturing.

As to the topic at hand: in what way is it dehumanizing to refer to a human as male or female? Being male or female is a fundamental part of being human, not something to be erased or ashamed of. I am a trans woman: a human male who identifies and lives socially as a woman. Should I hide the fact that I’m male? Why?

You only have to be wrong about getting murdered once.

It's doesn't need to be "a single event" that happened to the parent.

Many individual observations, talks with residents, learning what they consider "normal" and "acceptable" baseline are also very possible to scare someone used in a safer city off for life.

Then there are also the actual stats.

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#des...

But changing your habits while in a city in the top 2% for crime might be.

I would say it is quite prudent and rational, because you cannot be killed more than once

London is the European (well, kind of) city that most people cite as being bad for knife crime. It's still rare enough that a stabbing will make the national news though.

For a basic comparison, in 2022 there were 710 murders in the UK. 282 were stabbings. In the US there were 26,031 murders (a little more than 20,000 using guns), which is 36 times more, while the US has a population that's only 5 times that of the UK.

But this is really true in general. I consider Boston a pretty safe city. But there are absolutely areas that I wouldn't be walking around late at night.