It's misleading to lump violent crime and property crime together. SF is skewed very heavily towards property crime. This stabbing incident is a rare event, and broken auto glass is common. They're not the same.
In my experience SF Police are extremely on it. They caught the suspect in my case based on Nest video camera footage.
SFPD in the Mission is useless: they came to a property theft and told the residents to watch youtube videos about how thieves are opening garage doors, issued a perfunctory report for insurance, and left. No -- none, zilch -- attempt to find the perpetrators. Total time on site was less than 5 minutes. They were scared to be out of their cruiser and on the actual sidewalks!!!
SFPD's office is a a mere 3 blocks from the BART/16th street open-air drug market, there is very rarely a police officer on site. Another 3 blocks away, Capp street, just got closed to auto traffic by SF politicians because the police were so incompetent that it was becoming a fire risk (for SFFD vehicles on 19th). They cannot even police their immediate vicinity!
SFPD mostly are known for zooming around in their SUV cruisers in packs of two, blocking traffic, shooting at the unhoused, and ignoring traffic violations. This after arriving in caravans of police SUV cars (at least 3!) with lights blazing, streets on which mission residents walk every day unarmed.
Completely useless. I've seen one cop walking patrol on the central mission sidewalks in 11 years. SFPD mission station is so afraid of the people they are ostensibly there to protect that they barricaded themselves from the street for 3 years after the BML marches. Should be completely disbanded and rebuilt from the ground up to be a violent crime unit only, with traffic, property, unhoused, responses going to another entity entirely. Since the SF homeless outreach campaign went into effect I've felt much safter walking around the mission. More of that, less of SFPD. Is there even a vice squad? SFPD doesn't care about sex trafficking.
SFPD leadership should be publicly accountable and subject to recall. Looking at you William Scott.
Yes, it is obvious that SFPD doesn't give a shit about the sex work on Shotwell st, etc. in the Mission - but that is different from saying they would not follow up on a violent assault or murder.
https://www.ksbw.com/article/sfpd-refused-to-help-stop-san-f...
https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/03/columnist-sf-police-ta...
etc etc
Not going to keep replying, my point is merely that i think the SFPD will respond to violent crime reports.
There was no suspect or anything, I didn't have good evidence, I did not expect them to solve anything because that would be an unreasonable expectation. They gave me a report number to give to insurance.
I had a half dozen car and home break-ins in San Francisco that I did not report. I now regret this as I should have done my part to at least make the statistics accurate, even if it wouldn't help me recover my goods. I see it as being part of the solution opposed to part of the problem
I also recommend getting renters insurance, which can help with the financial burden
Why make the comment then? What can anyone gain from reading it?
I've certainly read theories that it's a malicious strategy of the police union to make the city council look bad, and the SPOG president has made some pretty shocking political statements, so it honestly wouldn't be that surprising.
I'm guessing it's a mix of both, but I can't really prove anything.
The same was true of both SF and Austin, to be fair.
On the other hand stabbings and murder are taken very seriously by law enforcement.
You're expecting the police to show up in a 60 second window? Do you realize how little time it takes to smash a window and leave?
Say I came to your car in the middle of the night and left a strange note on it and then walked away. Do you think there is any way that you could find me with no clues about who I am?
I was pointing out that car break-ins are treated very differently from violent crime.
If there is an inference to be drawn, I’d say it is that we should not act as if the two kinds of crime are equivalent.
You think that a few honey pots and cameras will slow them down? Imaginative but unrealistic thinking. Someone stole some wood from my yard, and I have them on camera. What am I supposed to do with their image? How do you suggest I find them? Is it worth my billing rate to walk around the neighborhood with their image asking people where they might be for $30 worth of wood? Say we have a database of petty criminals, if I find them do you think they have the assets to pay for the glass and items from an auto break-in?
The economic incentives are not aligned for a moonshot on stopping petty property crime.
The US criminal justice system is not set up to handle these sorts of offenders, most of whom probably just require detox and social services.
I assumed the same but based on reporting I've seen on SF local news, at least some of them are doing it out of cars. Pull up next to a likely target, dude jumps out of the passenger seat and takes a quick look, smash & grab if there's anything good, drive off.
I've lived in multiple cities and can say that this is wrong.
I find that generally most people imagine these thefts are being done by homeless people on the streets but it's usually actually organized gangs driving in from Oakland.
Same thing when I lived in DC, organized criminals driving in from SE DC to rob the rich neighborhoods.
which state, with lots of asterisks about why this comparison is difficult and likely not telling the complete story, that:
>For England and Wales, we added together three crime categories: "violence against the person, with injury," "most serious sexual crime," and "robbery." This produced a rate of 775 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
>For the United States, we used the FBI’s four standard categories for violent crime that Bier cited. We came up with a rate of 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
I see this a lot on the internet and comments like this are not as relevant as you might think.
Saying place X is better off than place Y is often an incongruent comparison followed by similar fallacies. Y'all, each place is unique and faces a long and considerable history as to how they got there and the type of people that have and currently do live there. I can't even begin to recall the number of times I heard this type of comparison during the Obama administration. America is not similar to Sweden, Finland, Germany, Japan or Canada.
For example: here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re neck and neck with chart-topping Japan for life expectancy - while most of the Deep South has a life expectancy roughly in-line with the average Iraqi.
Yes, America is an Odd Place.
Except for, you know, they are each an organization of humans with access to technology and other cultures. Maybe there's something to be learned.
This seems completely unconnected to the discussion, but ok.
> Now that Europeans have sufficiently Americanized they’ll soon discover that the problems america faces now are in fact universal to all liberal democracies.
I concede, this may be true.
Regardless of what they themselves or anybody else calls them, what matters is what policies they concretely support.
They serve as arbiters of morality to keep the “normal” liberals in line and make certain the window of discussion never again approaches heretical talk of “nationalization” or “the 1%”.
There’s still old school leftists around that strongly support the policies you described, but they’ve been essentially banished from the political sphere at even the metro level. Even the DSA has been nearly entirely co-opted by this quasi-religious garbage.
Your words indicate your knowledge of the Ukraine conflict is lacking. But believe what you want. https://www.thepostil.com/conflict-in-ukraine-genesis/
Neither was Stalin.
The cultural diversity in America compared to the countries above far exceeds what most people give credit for. First and second generation immigrants with different cultural ideologies amplify the differences that you would experience in somewhere like that set of countries. These cultural differences create multitudes of challenges that are not experienced anywhere else to this scale. Again, America is different.
So for the vast majority of property crime, the victim ultimately ends up being the insurance premium, and everybody involved kind of knows this, even if they don't say it outright.
The nature of the drugs (fentanyl), the manifestation (homelessness) and the enforcement (or lack there of) are central to the problem faced here.
It is not a US problem. It is not a west problem. It is not a city problem. It is an urban-west-coast-city problem.
The nature of the drugs (fentanyl), the manifestation (homelessness) and the enforcement (or lack there of) are central to the problem faced here.
It is not a US problem. It is not a west problem. It is not a city problem. It is an urban-US-west-coast-city problem.
If your society is full of thieves, what do you do to address it? HINT: the French Monarchy tried solving the problem via tightened enforcement.
Ultimately though, you have to change the culture. Make thieves seem pathetic and mean rather than rebellious and cool.
It’s totally an American craziness.
When I was younger and walked around at night me and my friends would get mugged fairly regularly (~6X over 4 years) and the police would maybe show up 24 hours later at a random time. One time I even had a clip from a gun the dudes dropped as they were running away (it was empty) and the police never came and took it. I probably still have it around somewhere.
I moved to the suburbs recently and it is amazing being able to park and walk around without being afraid of break ins or muggings.
You've been taken in by a lot of false media narratives. Trump said his bit about "American Carnage in our cities" and set about this revival of the tough on crime rhetoric from the 80s and 90s, a time when violent crime was much higher than today.
Your position is not backed by the statistics.
I can 100% assure you it's not crime rates driving this perception. There were pandemic related increases but the trend of the last 30 years runs counter to the narrative.
I regularly stay in SF in SOMA, and the thing that gives the impression it is unsafe is all the violent, mentally ill addicts roaming around accosting people. The last time I was there, I couldn't go a single day of walking two blocks from hotel to office without encountering at least one.
You can deny that reality all you like, but it is a reality.
Most of the car theft crime comes from organized groups driving here from Oakland, not the addicts who largely are shoplifting from Walgreens, etc.
Uber and Lyft drivers in SF often come from similar places. Basically distant cities with less prosperity and fewer job prospects.
Maybe you should work on this "you being afraid" problem rather than question my ability to deal with reality.
Fyi, my brother is a mentally ill homeless person in another part of the state.
You're a very tolerant individual.
to address your immediate example(s), ignoring your obvious hyperbole which shouldn't need to be addressed in this discussion, as it's not related to the types of human interactions the OP clearly described (which you've lumped into your comment in bad-faith, anyway).
i am not sure why you've filled your head with so much fear, or why you've lumped a certain population into a category of subhuman, inferior, and not deserving of compassion, help, respect, kindness, integrity, and understanding -- if you are finding it difficult to make eye contact with people in general, and regularly, let alone sick individuals, this might distinctly be a personal issue, and perhaps one governed more by trauma, fear and sociopathy than basic decency and human kindness.
i mean christ, imagine leveraging children in order to promote a rather uncaring and indifferent treatment about people, who were once also children. obviously there's a discussion here about appropriate behavior and whether or not someone, say a junkie, is behaving appropriately in a given context, but to somehow suddenly subscribe to this notion that once a person behaves inappropriately, they are no longer deserving of basic decency (eye-contact) is appallingly inhuman to me, and privleged.
since you're leveraging children, am i safe in assuming that i imagine you are okay with children being around alchohol, or even participating in the attending of sporting events (american football for example)?
like, am i safe in assuming you have seen children come into contact or be exposed to effects of alcohol or alcholism, where people behave (in)appropriately -- let's be real, the behavior of a lot of drunk fans at sporting events_in_front_of_children_is laughably appropriate at best
or do you stop the buck short once the lifestyle is a couple of standard deviations away from what you find.. "acceptable"?
perhaps if you started viewing people as well, human beings, perhaps... just perhaps, you'll start asking yourself: "how would i as an individual wish to be treated, if i were sick? would i like to be screamed at, ignored, condescended, looked down upon, shamed, ostracized, ridiculed, ..., or would i like to be treated with at least basic dignity?"
i wonder what would happen if we as a society shifted our attitude as a whole a few standard deviations back to a more compassionate middle ground, instead of constantly enabling, perpetuating, and encouraging fear-based/fear-driven relationships and interpersonal interactions.
also as a total aside, i am really curious: just how much personal time have you spent being around addicts/junkies/or anyone living a deviant lifestyle?
Did Bob get killed by perception?
Sort by total for property crime and it's 4th.
But, I've heard that risk from casual contact with hypodermic needles is rare. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2529409/
Risk is obviously much higher if you re-use the needles to inject drugs. Casual contact with the needle is low risk.
That's assuming lots of needles. I see needles sometimes. I use the 311 app when I see needles. But I don't see them in an area where my kids are going to play.
Show some evidence of this. I just gave you a counter example. Property crime is huge in SF and it never gets anywhere near the "most violent cities in America" lists, it's well below its weight in that regard.
Here's a quick googling for such a list, notice the absence of San Francisco: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-viol...