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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

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SF reminds me of college campuses. I went to a liberal college town. Everyone was a bleeding heart liberal who wanted to save the world. They voted Democrat. Even when their homes are trashed or burglarized, having to pickup hypodermic needles from drug users who tossed it on the street so their kid doesn't step on it, or when they are confront with homeless who became violent.... they would still vote Democrat. It's not about the party. It's the fact the policy we have does not work. Homelessness and NIMBY have become the third rail of American politics.

San Francisco has become a city of one-party rule, which simply does not work. It never will. When a political party's power goes unchecked, it always becomes corrupt, incompetent, or both. This is universal and irrespective of ostensible ideology.

It's because both parties have become extreme and populist. And there is only an illusion of freedom of choice. America needs more than 2 parties for accurate representation.

This ^

If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.

Marginal San Francisco voters are an uninformed bunch. Boudin won his election with the second choice votes of a candidate named Nancy Tung who was on the opposite end of the criminal justice reform spectrum, so much so that the coalition to which Boudin belonged could not even countenance Tung as the mayoral appointment to the police commission.

Winners of San Francisco elections come down to reality of machine politics and not ideological preferences.

big "I moved here 4 years ago that means I know everything about this place" energy

I’ve lived here for 25 years, but I could certainly be wrong. Likely not in the way you propose though.

i've lived in portland, stl, and DC. Just moved to bay area a few weeks ago and never have I in my entire 36 years of living in the US have I felt so unsafe. Not sure if you are blinded by living here for your entire life but this place is really not normal and it is by no means even close to what I would consider remotely safe.

Portland is by far less safe than San Francisco. It had double the homicides in 2022 with 2/3rds the population.

SF is weird and should probably not be considered a city for these kinds of analyses without Oakland and possibly the rest of the bay: the majority of the violence occurs in Oakland.

You can go your entire time in San Francisco without visiting Oakland, and all the cities on the Peninsula or North Bay you're likely to visit instead have much, much lower crime rates. I'm not sure why including Oakland is necessary to make an apples-to-apples comparison to Portland, which OP claims was safer than San Francisco.

Sure and you can live in Chicago without venturing to the south-side, most people who live on the west-side in LA only go to south LA for events and stay out of east LA.

My point is that SF is a bit odd in that it's a county and city that ends very abruptly, and Oakland is a 12 minute car or BART or 25 minute ferry ride from Embarcadero, thus the crime stats in the bay don't make much sense until you start averaging them across the metro area. It's not that Oakland is crazy violent, it's just that the a lot of the most violent areas of the metro fall in its borders, it's not that SF has the most vagrant or larcenous population, it's that it has a good climate for it: lots of the soft targets and toothless police force.

you are probably right, i haven't been back to portland in 15 years and i've heard it's gotten worse.

How safe you feel and how safe you are are two different things. San Francisco’s homicide rate, compared to other large American cities, is not high. America is just a batshit violent country.

St. Louis is literally the worst major city in the US for murder.

Do you feel it was a mistake to move there?

no because i live in mountain view area now and there's a community of tech enthusiasts/engineer here that makes it valuable for what i'm looking for in life. It comes down to your goals and what you or your family want/need. Everyone will be slightly different so it may not be the best decision for anyone else.

>> SF has become so unsafe. Why aren't the democrats in charge voted out of office for other people who will do something about it? Do people just not vote in that city?

> If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.

Didn't SF recall its local prosecutor recently over crime issues? It sounds like people may actually be trying (somewhat) to vote the way the GP thinks they should.

I would hazard a guess that the answer to the GP's question is something along the lines that SF residents hate Republicans, but Democrats only come in so many flavors nowadays (and not even all of those are available in the Bay Area).

Violent crime went down during Boudin’s tenure. Don’t base opinions on media propaganda.

Per data provided by Boudin? I know most colleagues widely even stopped reporting crimes such as break-ins because the police wouldn't even show up.

Let alone pick up the phone - which happened in my case twice in a year

Per data provided by the police department. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/

> Violent crime went down during Boudin’s tenure. Don’t base opinions on media propaganda.

So are SF residents propagandized sheeple and recalled him for no good reason, or is there more to the story than your first sentence?

Garry Tan and police unions from multiple cities funding a big campaign?

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/garry-tan-vs-chesa-b...

https://twitter.com/jackiefielder_/status/164165611708338176...

Maybe recalling Boudin is right or not, but either way when a lot of money is injected into a campaign, it tends to influence outcomes. Just see Prop 22.

Boudin had plenty of donors from around the country (including from billionaires) and was getting free puff pieces placed about him in The New Yorker about his Los Angeles fundraisers. Money flows in all directions.

Certainly, but not equally.

> By June, the groups seeking to recall Boudin together raised $7.2 million to oust him, while the district attorney’s backers gathered about $3.3 million.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/Chesa-Boudin-ou...

Yes because by that point Boudin had lost his electoral credibility. It's instructive to see who funded his original run for DA.

The narrative was against Boudin by the time of the recall, but that campaign was nevertheless still funded by big money, which has a tendency to amplify narratives, and this entire discussion was focused on the recall anyway.

The entire discussion has no focus and starts with a false claim about violent crime being down between 2020 and 2022. In any case, claims that money influenced outcomes are ill-substantiated since many San Francisco election results go against the best-funded outcomes.

Though apparently, neither in the case of the election of Boudin, nor in his recall!

https://ballotpedia.org/District_Attorney_election_in_San_Fr...

https://ballotpedia.org/Chesa_Boudin_recall,_San_Francisco,_...

Yes, even in that case. In a ranked choice election, you cannot simply look at the numbers in isolation. The opponents to Boudin ran something of a slate where they cross-promoted each other. So in a real sense, Boudin won despite being outspent in 2020. (Though there is a compelling case to make that Boudin's victory was mostly a fluke due to Nancy Tung's Cantonese language voters being misled by local Chinese-only newspapers about policy positions.)

It is not a false claim. Violent crime is more than homicides. Violent crime was down according to SF city police department: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/ You can see more statistics in the discussion here: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra... Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA.

Police department crime statistics in San Francisco are so unreliable that a single store electing to report all shoplifting incidents tripled the citywide rate: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Targ.... Many policy changes are being enacted throughout the city such as teachers who were beaten deaf by their students not being allowed to file a police report: https://missionlocal.org/2022/04/total-meltdown-at-everett-m....

Homicides give a useful corrective since they’re harder to under report.

Given this fact and the various confounders (e.g. how do you rob or assault someone during a time of complete shutdown, how does nilling out the substantial daytime population increase do to per capita rates, is an overdose death really not worth reporting in crime statistics), at best we don’t know what actually happened to violent crime rates in the last three years.

Shoplifting is not a "violent crime". It was everywhere, out in the open, broad daylight. Ride a bike into a store, ride out with a garbage bag full of stuff, set up a table around the corner and sell what you stole at a discount.

Boudin refused to prosecute any of this.

Boudin's charging rate was not significantly different than other DAs: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/3QGJv/1/

SF has a significantly lower charging rate than other major cities, but there's many factors that go into that (the quality of police work, percentage of defendants that live in the district, etc.).

Violent crime is more than homicides. Violent crime was down according to SF city police department: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/ You can see more statistics in the discussion here: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...

Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA. This narrative that radical leftist district attorneys are responsible for crime is media propaganda completely divorced from the factual realities of crime.

Comparing charging rates of recent San Francisco district attorneys with other cities shows San Francisco has tended to charge way fewer crimes brought to them. Boudin and previous attorneys have blamed this on poor policing, and that SF is unique in that people in surrounding metros travel into SF to commit burglaries. Even so, that has nothing to do with the political leanings of the DA, since cities with much higher charging rates and lower petty crime have Democrat DAs.

No it did not. Homicides were up in 2020 and 2021 with 2022 flat at 2021's highs.

Violent crime (robberies, rapes, and assaults) was down: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/

You really think 41 versus 49 homicides in a year is the result of which DA is in office? The homicide numbers are not far outside of historical trends, which is downward over the last few decades. https://patch.com/img/cdn20/users/22880695/20191114/014855/s...

The notion that the DA has any outsized impact on crime rates seems baseless to me. I've never seen any evidence which demonstrates a real relationship between district attorneys and overall crime.

I’ve replied to you elsewhere about the issue of using official statistics in the way you are. I’d recommend not making the same point in two places to minimize comment duplication.

I was not making claims here about causal relationships between DAs and crime rates. I was simply engaging with the question about trends of violent crime rates in San Francisco. If pressed, my guess is San Francisco under Boudin saw a slower increase in violent crime than comparable jurisdictions. However, I also think Boudin actually accomplished very little since most meaningful criminal justice reform occurs at the state level. Reasonable models suggest San Francisco incarcerates too little and Modesto too much. That’s why, for example, Prop 25 bail reform would have led to more pretrial detention in San Francisco while reducing the rate for California overall.

I disagree with your assessment of homicide trends. The United States and San Francisco both have seen a trend shift towards increased homicide that would set us back approximately three decades. This is significant.

If a DA in any case has no control over crime rates in the community, then it’s a vibes based job, and Boudin had horrible vibes, as evidenced by his getting recalled.

I don't think I need to be "inside" to realize the crime and drug situation in san francisco is comic-book level lunacy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2CVMCZ6F2M

Not really relevant to what I’m saying. You were asking “why aren’t the Democrats being voted out”, I’m saying a question like that demonstrates that you don't understand the situation.

I live in SF. He understands the situation. This city is an insane asylum whose outcomes are driven by a combination of apathy, NIMBY-ism, virtue signaling, and good old fashioned leftist lunacy. The city was airdropped billions of dollars thanks to its becoming a technology hub (through no efforts of its own), and it would probably be better off if the entire industry left, the tax base evaporated, and it had to fend for itself. But then again, at that point it'd just turn into Detroit with nicer weather.

> I live in SF

> the city is an insane asylum

I guess voters aren’t the only ones acting irrationally then! If I perceived the place I live in to be an insane asylum I’d probably look into moving.

The SF homicide rate is close to national average. Are there any comparably large cities that vote Republican in national politics?

Here's how homicide rates compare in the 11 largest US cities with a Republican mayor and San Francisco (sorted by population):

  13.4 Jacksonville, FL
  12.6 Fort Worth, TX
   6.9 San Francisco, CA
  11.9 Oklahoma City, OK
  13.0 Fresno, CA
   4.9 Mesa, AZ
   6.6 Omaha, NE
   7.9 Colorado Springs, CO
   3.1 Virginia Beach, VI
  10.7 Miami, FL
  14.3 Tulsa, OK
  14.7 Bakersfield, CA

For comparison here are 14 cities with a Democrat mayor from the top 50. I picked these cities by taking the 11 Republican cities and for each picking the next highest and next lowest population Democrat cities:

   3.2 San Jose, CA
   8.2 Austin, TX
  22.4 Columbus, OH
  31.8 Washington, DC
   4.4 El Paso, TX
  17.1 Tucson, AZ
  10.9 Sacramento, CA
  30.7 Kansas City, MO
  32.0 Atlanta, GA
   5.5 Raleigh, NC
   8.1 Long Beach, CA
  30.9 Oakland, CA
  22.1 Minneapolis, MN
   5.8 Wichita, CA

VI is postal abbrev for Virgin Islands, not Virginia and Wichita is in Kansas.

What's your source? Where are you getting these statistics?

Parties of mayors [1]. Homicide rates [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_large...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

SF has a slightly lower murder rate than the US as a whole. Lower than most of the republican states, and lower than Miami, which some people seem to be trying to make the new tech capital.

Murder rate is a proxy for proximity to trauma care. SF does well. The better measure of societal violence is the crime rate. SF is worse than 98% of cities in the US.

Which crime? According to this [1] San Francisco is high for larceny-theft (#2), but #66 for murder and non-negligent manslaughter, #67 for rape, #20 for robbery, #66 for aggravated assault, #55 for burglary, #34 for motor vehicle theft, and #23 for arson.

This is out of the 100 most populous of the cities that have data in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports system.

Here are the top 5 in each of these categories.

Murder etc: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Baton Rouge

Rape: New Orleans, Anchorage, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Spokane

Robbery: Baltimore, Cleveland, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis

Aggravate assault: Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee

Burglary: Cleveland, Memphis, Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Baltimore

Larceny-theft: Spokane, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Memphis, St. Louis

Motor vehicle theft: Albuquerque, Oakland, Detroit, Portland OR, San Bernardino

Arson: Detroit, Buffalo, Baton Rouge, Bakersfield, Stockton

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

Homicide is an interesting metric because death is harder to cover up and thus we should expect it to be reported. There are many other crimes which people just wouldn't bother to report.

It would be overly speculative to argue that Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US, has a spectacular murder rate compared to SF because medical care is so good in SF.

>Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US

Jackson, MS is in Hinds county, which voted 73.4% for Biden in 2020, 71.1% for Clinton in 2016, and 71.5% for Obama in 2012. There hasn't been a single Republican mayor of Jackson in the Post-WW2 period. It's strange to call someone else's comment overly speculative when yours is flat out incorrect.

What percentage of murders in "Republican states" occur in cities governed by Democrats?

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