SF homicide rate is close to the national average.
> San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of US cities, both small and large.
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-san-francisco-nearly-mos...
People who want to sort major US cities by homicide, assault, or other crimes can look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
But, its non-violent crime and property crime numbers are through the roof which makes it feel incredibly unsafe.
Miami, on the other hand, actually has a higher homicide rate than SF but because the streets are clean and property crime is much much lower it feels far safer than SF. Also, to be honest, for people reading hacker news, homicides are an incredibly rare black swan event, unlike property crime which you experience almost daily in SF. So, it makes sense for this crowd to have a place higher utility on low property crime than on low homicides. And I'm not judging, I moved to Miami and couldn't be happier with that decision.
The murders that happen in my part of town are usually drug-related, like an OD or, in the case of my neighbor, a drunk and jealous girlfriend with access to a firearm.
Parts of Miami are definitely cleaner, and some parts of Miami are pretty bad too, if not worse (parts of Wynwood, particularly south of the Wynwood Arcade used to be filled with homeless tents; and that's to say nothing of Liberty City, Little Haiti, etc.. ). However, Miami looks nicer but in many aspects there's some real trash beyond the facade. My building is under 5 years old, in a great (and growing) part of town, yet has had multiple murders in it. I used to live at Icon Bay, which had a literal drug lord living in one of the penthouses until there was a large-scale raid that forced him out. The FBI literally has a unit in my complex because they are here all the time - drug rings, prostitution rings, kidnapping, etc... are all happening right under your nose, but since the perps drive a Benz and walk around in a $250 pair of sneakers, it's less in-your-face (and more socially accepted) than some homeless dude in the Tenderloin shooting up heroin and taking a shit on the sidewalk. One guy in my elevator line was moving weed by the pound on a regular basis like it was nothing, and I had no idea until the property manager pointed out that they had recently been arrested on felony drug charges. Another in my building wears an ankle monitor yet owns a fleet of exotic cars. It's so much harder to tell here than anywhere else I've lived....until you know what to look for.
And that's to say nothing of the outrageous amount of scams here, particularly medicare/medicaid fraud. I'd take the homeless guy who shits on the sidewalk any day over the guy who stole millions from medicare and drives around in a Ferrari.
At least in SF/Bay Area, you can tell who the trashy folks are, and who the mentally ill people are. In Florida, they are allowed to scam the government, drive around in flashy cars, and better yet - they can buy guns and carry them around, loaded, without a permit.
But, personally, I'd rather have the medicare-fraud-guy than the shits-on-the-street guy in my neighborhood. The former hurts me a little no matter where they live, the latter hurts me a lot but only if they are nearby.
Just in 2014, the national average was 4.5 per 100,000.
And these numbers are several times that of large European cities.
Still, this is not as bad as Oakland, with a homicide rate several times that.
[1] https://abc7news.com/feature/san-francisco-bay-area-safety-t...
[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
There were 10 more in 2022 than in 2014[0], which was the low point for homicide rates nationally[1]. The absolute number is fairly flat and per-capita rates are well down on 2000s levels[2].
[0] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...
[2] https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ...
I remember in the 90's that oakland and east palo alto were basically murder capitals, and SF wasn't too far off.
To be fair though, I've lived in areas that were next door to top 5 murder/capita rates throughout the 90s-00s and they were all heavy drug and gang areas you knew to avoid. Most of those have also been cleaned up as property values have sky rocketed triggering development.
That is in of itself not alarming. An average city would have an average homicide rate: That's what averages are. It's only alarming if the city has (a) one of the lowest homicide rates nationally, or (b) one of the highest homicide rates nationally. Being average just means that it's the middle of the pack.
- If it's genuine: There's nothing to worry about. Extreme paranoia about (a) is in this case a false positive.
- If it's fraudulent: They're moving the sources of homicide out of their jurisdiction and onto somewhere else. Or they're increasing enforcement, in which case there may be increased false positives as a consequence.