SF is also quite close to the national homicide average while being denser than most cities.
City boundaries within a metropolitan area are often quite arbitrary. A murder can happen on one block and be in the city and two blocks over and outside the city.
A good example is Detroit. Greater metro Detroit has 4.3M people, but the city of Detroit has 632,000.
And the city of Detroit is where most of the poverty is and most murders happen, within the larger metro area, so you end up with super high murder rates for Detroit and super low murder rates for the surrounding area.
But in the grand scheme of things it’s just one big metro area.
The largest cities in big conservative states are where all the Democrats in those states live. And the rural areas in all the big liberal states are where all the Republicans in those states live. Democrats by and large run the cities.
Economically speaking they also embrace a basically libertarian style of free market capitalism (in respect to everything except land use), which is another reason they’re not a great comparison.
SF is a single party city defunding the police. While they parallel Singapore in the single party system they are close to the opposite in nearly all other aspects and it shows. Both places are awash in money but one of them only seems to get worse the more money pours in. If I had to choose between the political system of San Francisco and that of Singapore I would choose the latter.
It is a good thing I do not have to choose though since I don't like either of those systems, it is just that watching the slow-motion train wreck of San Francisco (among others) being run into the ground by self-proclaimed saviours of humanity is so disheartening, especially seen in the light of the claims made by those who push these policies. They must know that they are destroying the place, they can not be so blindsided by ideology. This only leaves the possibility that they are so hell-bent on staying in power that they will do anything it takes, no matter the consequences. How they can rhyme this with their self-proclaimed virtuous goals is beyond me.