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Comment by ninjagoo | Hacker News Reader

So Wikipedia has a list of US Cities, sortable by crime rate, and has separate statistics for violent crime and property crime [1]. This list is based on FBI's data from 2019.

By that list, sorted by the total violent crime rate from highest to lowest, SF is 37th on the list of 100 cities, NYC is 59th, Austin is 73rd. In absolute numbers, SF is 715/100k, NYC is 539/100k, Austin is 415/100k.

Also, by that list, the top cities for violent crime with population over 1M are: Chicago #17, Houston #18, Philly #25, Tuscon #29, Dallas #31, LA #32, Phoenix #33.

Now if only we could get a graph of this data mapped over time, it would be interesting to see trends.

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

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The problem with examining violent crime per city is that the majority of violent crime occurs in specific areas, typically poor areas that are known to be dangerous by most locals who avoid them unless they live there.

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.

The issue is you often find yourself there even when attempting to avoid. For instance, once I got a flat tire right as I went through a few mile stretch of bad town. The locals saw I got a flat tire and was distracted, took the opportunity to put a gun to my head. The chance of that happening while you have a working vehicle is 0% and few people plan to have a vehicle failure exactly at the wrong spot.

> 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.

But is it actually quite high?

Anecdotally, I notice many more people going through psychotic episodes here, but generally less organized violent crime. The drug dealing/prostitution is mostly restricted to a few parts of the Mission and the TL.

> What the majority of people are concerned about is the chances of violent crime that is likely to affect them.

I don't know, I also care about violent crime that happens to anyone. I care about all life, not just my own.

Why isn't this thread about New Orleans, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Detroit then?

NOLA used to be quite terrifying. Yet downtown French Qtr is a different world now. You can walk Warehouse to Frenchmen Marigny 3am just fine. Canal St. is really the only dicey area

Both Manhattan and SF are now more dangerous than downtown NOLA imo, but NYC is tame compared to SF. SF is getting next level - almost comparable to Johannesburg ZA

NOLA has higher violent crime (but lower property crime) than San Francisco.

Oakland and San Jose usually had more violent crime than SF but founders knew better than to put an office there, knowing ppl will be regularly working well past midnight

The event that sparked all this conversation is the homicide of Bob Lee. If we're talking about the problem of car break-ins, robberies, or vandalism, that's one thing. But on the matter of homicide, SF (6.35)¹ tracks closely to the national average (7.8)².

Property crime is what substantially contributes to the image that SF is an unsafe city.

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

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

You’re still missing the point. The fact that it was Bob Lee and not a drug dealer in a turf war is why the murder statistics don’t capture the issue. 50 random murders is much worse than 50 gang members killing each other from a “how safe is a non-violent person” perspective.

Right, but given that San Francisco has average levels of homicide and presumably drug turf wars are more common in urban areas, that means that SF is particularly safe for a non-violent person relative to baseline.

This argument makes no sense at all. San Francisco homicide count is close to the national average, however, unlike most cities, these homicides aren't confined to bad neighborhoods and criminals operating within them, but can affect anyone.

Which makes SF far more dangerous to law abiding professionals like ourselves, compared to cities that have the same homicide count, but where the victims are other demographics and not our own.

> Which makes SF far more dangerous to law abiding professionals like ourselves

If San Francisco has national average drug crime as well as above national average rates of "professionals" as well as organized crime, then it seems to follow that if SF homicide count is close to the national average, you are actually less likely to be a victim of a homicide than if all of those homicides were among a small population of "professionals."

There's been plenty of evidence posted to this thread showing that SF is more dangerous to law-abiding civilians than other cities. This in addition to the incident that started this thread in the first place: the homicide of a law-abiding professional in an upscale part of SF.

You keep trying to counter that with wild speculation that contradicts well-established facts. It simply won't do.

Could you link me some of this evidence?

Or maybe show me how the fact that Bob Lee was murdered proves that SF is more dangerous to law-abiding civilians than other cities?

Property crime in SF is likely grossly under-reported. E.g. constant car break-ins is useless to report - the crimes are done openly and brazenly, and the police is doing nothing about it, which is understandable given they are in colossal staffing shortage - organized purposely by the city government for political and ideological reasons. In fact, a lot of things like shoplifting is not even counted as a "crime" anymore. And certainly quality of life issues - like tent cities on the street, open air drug markets, garbage everywhere - is not technically a "crime" either...

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.

>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.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that victims of violent crime are less likely to report it post-BLM/George Floyd? I know some people have been less likely to call certain things in, like someone having a mental health crisis, out of fear that police may escalate, but violent crime?

No, I'm saying there is likely significantly more violent crime in 2023 than there were in 2019, so basing on 2019 is no longer relevant. The reporting likely suffered too, at least for a relatively minor crime - you're less likely to report, say, a mugging if you know police is not going to do anything about it - but that's not the primary point. The primary point post-BLM the actual levels of crime rose significantly, so pre-BLM data is likely under-estimating the current level of crime significantly.

You are assuming defunding the police leads to more violent crime... any evidence to back that up?

Yes, plenty. Case in point: https://slaynews.com/news/san-francisco-throws-in-towel-asks...

The same is observed pretty much everywhere where "defund the police" crowd rules the day.

This is an opinion piece... it has no data to back up crime increasing, other than to say people complained.

Whatever you want to tell yourself to make yourself happy. I have no horse in this race anymore, if you want to try to suppress violent crime by "taxing the rich" and firing the policeman and distributing money among PhD-led NGOs which would experiment with newest theories on your city - be my guest. The results will speak for itself, and if you like what you see in SF (or similar major cities) now - well, enjoy it, while I enjoy what I think to be much better quality of life and no chance of getting randomly stabbed while walking around my home. I have pretty much zero motivation in convincing you - I showed you where I got my facts, all this is readily available, and with that I am done.

I've been reading this entire thread and I'd like to point out that basically all sub threads have gone the way this conversation has.

In short, someone will attack a progressive spectre, such as BLM, police abolitionism, rehabilitative justice, or the fact that economic inequality is strongly correlated with crime, they will be asked to show data supporting their position or shown data that directly contradicts it, and the op will then respond in anger with a lot more strawmans of progressive positions.

Given that you don't have the data to support your position, and others do have data to support the position you clearly and vehemently oppose, I'm really curious why you still hold that position? Like, what are you feeling right now?

Let's conspire as a country to drive all the homeless, addicts, and mentally ill to a few concentrated urban areas. Keep them well away from our white wealthy enclaves (NIMBY!). Now let's preen about how those urban areas are suddenly crime-ridden hellholes, and we told you all along it was the fault of your liberal policies.

> they will be asked to show data supporting their position

I did.

> shown data that directly contradicts it

It wasn't.

> will then respond in anger with a lot more strawmans of progressive positions.

That didn't happen. Defunding the police is exactly the position of the prog-woke crowd, and until the disastrous results started showing up, they didn't hide it - they campaigned on it. Once the inevitable happened, they started screaming "we didn't mean that" and pretending it's all strawmen. Yes you did. You meant exactly that, and you got what you wanted, and now people who trusted you are suffering the consequences. Some - the lethal ones.

> Given that you don't have the data to support your position

Except I do.

> others do have data to support the position you clearly and vehemently oppose

Except they don't.

> I'm really curious why you still hold that position?

Because I not only dislike myself being stabbed, but also others being stabbed? And when these policies are followed, people get stabbed. Also shot, mugged, robbed, carjacked, and so on. If you think ideology is worth it - enjoy it. I do not.

> what are you feeling right now?

I am feeling sad that more people have to suffer in service of idiotic ideology that clearly does not work, and I am feeling glad I am no longer one of these people.

In the case of SFPD, they were not abolished or defunded, in fact their budget increased.

Results have been disastrous in the usa because economic inequality has been skyrocketing. This is what the "prog woke" crowd has been warning about, and, as the data shows, very little if any of the "prog woke" policies have been enacted, even in "prog woke" hub San Francisco.

It's getting worse because the predictable reactionary cycle and ratcheting continues. A region virtue signals progressive positions, maybe even does a half measure (like eliminating cash bail, a blatantly classist policy), then ratchets back into reactionary land by cherry picking events, even if overall data shows improvements as expected. Or, like in the case of SF, contrarian forces will mean you can have a situation like "socialist DA elected," then the cops will simply stop doing their jobs, so whether the new da tries progressive policy or not is moot - enforcement will plummet.

Reactionary systems are remarkably powerful in the USA and that's why things will probably keep getting worse there.

San Francisco never defunded the police.

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...

Not sure how much of these cuts were achieved by the time they reversed the course, in 18 months, but that certainly was the plan, it was announced as such, and had full support of the police chief. Not that by 2020 SF wasn't drowning in feces anyway, so the defund itself certainly wasn't the cause - just another brick in the wall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot

I don't see how they situation is at all similar to a defund the police movement.

You don't have to speculate on that! San Francisco has a public crime dashboard for reported crime that generally runs just a few days behind real time. Violent crime is up a bit since pre-pandemic, yes, but still quite a ways from the late 90, and especially below the rise in violent crime in the mid 2000s.

Well we can have a discussion about Minneapolis then. No other large city actually defunded the police. A few other cities talked about it but ended up continuing to fund at pre-BLM rates or higher. The real problem is still accountability of the police. They quit doing their jobs and no one is doing a damn thing about it.

Even Minneapolis ended up reversing their "defund the police" effort:

> Dealing the final blow to the local "defund" movement last year was a city council vote to essentially refund a cut they'd made the prior year. Mayor Jacob Frey is proposing another budget bump for the next two fiscal years.

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/how-city-once-called-...

As far as I'm aware, every single city that defunded its police to any extent - ended up with a major crime surge and then reversed itself. You can see in the article that Minneapolis was no exception to that rule.

Yes, if you get beat the fuck up, but are otherwise alive and uninjured, what’s the point of reporting the crime? Police aren’t going to find whoever did this to you. You will just write down some information on a police report and they’ll say some encouraging words and then nothing.

Just go home.

So police aren’t going to do their job? And you’re ok with this? Why do we pay them so well?

No, I’m not okay with it. I want them to do their job. Chase down every last mugger. Arrest every illegal tent squatter that has popped up. Arrest drug addicts and indecent exposers and shoplifters. SF police should be working around the clock, until the city is completely cleaned out. People thinking about doing any kind of crime should be complaining how difficult police are making life for them. People should be crying foul about how hard on crime the SF police have gotten.

But they won’t do it. Hell, if they did all the above I wouldn’t mind paying them double.

> SF police should be working around the clock, until the city is completely cleaned out.

Agreed. They won't though. Sigh.

> Property crime in SF is likely grossly under-reported

Hearsay.

> E.g. constant car break-ins is useless to report

Not if you want to file an insurance claim, no. Or for example if you oppose car break-ins, then you might want the statistics to be correct.

NYC in particular suffers from rampant under-reporting on crime stats. Most burglaries and petty property crimes in NYC that I have heard of went completely unreported - either they didn't bother to go into the station, or they went in to make a report and the police basically turned them away. They openly don't care about "small" property crimes, and demonstrate disdain for you if you are coming in to make a police report for anything short of an attempted murder. The alternative that happens in a some communities is vigilante justice.

> alternative that happens in a some communities is vigilante justice

And NYC is now famous for prosecuting you for engaging in self defense as well.

https://nypost.com/2022/07/10/nyc-bodega-owners-urge-da-brag...

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/nyc-garage-worker-charged-with...

In the first story, the charges were dropped.

In the second story, who knows what in the hell is even going on. It happened too recently for there to be any clarity on what actually happened there. That could easily have been an over-zealous person causing problems (like George Zimmerman) rather than self-defense. Time and the trial will tell.

Outside of NYC, the guy in the first story would never have been arrested, and the charges were dropped due to immense public pressure on the DA's office. The police stated that they intended to charge him with murder.

The police don’t bring charges. They can intend whatever they want.

Charges were dropped. But why do they keep getting raised against people defending themselves, and never raised against chronic nuisances?

The point is to inculcate a state of learned helplessness into productive citizens.

You're right, we don't have the details yet, but from what we do have, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury willing to convict someone that shot an assailant with the assailants gun after being shot twice. Once you've been shot, you are on a clock for getting medical assistance. I could see how retaliatory shooting is valid self defense as it ensures that the person who just threatened your life is unable to continue threatening your life, even if you have possession of the gun(because you've just been shot) and it ensures that you have a scene where paramedics can actually attend to you. If you want to ensure your best odds of survival, making sure your assailant is dead also ensures that you aren't competing for medical resources...but I'm not sure taking it that far would qualify as self defense. Using deadly force though, seems entirely justified.

> You're right, we don't have the details yet, but from what we do have, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury willing to convict someone that shot an assailant with the assailants gun after being shot twice.

All of this is alleged, and based only on testimony of the person who did the shooting. We simply don't actually know what happened here yet (if we ever will). You're making assumptions based on the New York Post's reporting, which is a tabloid at best. It's entirely possible that the person who did the shooting was the one who had the gun all along.

The second story is pretty clear the attendant witnessed a person looking in random cars confronted the person. The lowlife took out his gun and shot the attendant who wrestled away the gun and shot the criminal in turn.

Nobody looks into random cars in a lot without intent to steal and he was the only one to introduce a gun into the affair.

None of those facts are known in the second story. It's all based solely on the testimony of the person who did the shooting. That's why I emphasized it's way too soon after to actually know what happened. Also, you're putting way too much faith into the New York Post, which is a tabloid that lives by the motto 'if it bleeds, it leads'.

> In the first story, the charges were dropped.

They never should have been filed. The victim was cuffed to his hospital bed recovering from two gunshot wounds.

That’s ridiculous and horrific.

If you’ve ever been falsely arrested, you’d realize that the process alone is punishment, and should never be applied without significant care.

It’s Bolshevism, plain and simple. Criminals are “socially close” and therefore blameless except in the most blatant circumstances, whereas gainfully employed, law-abiding citizens are bourgeoisie or kulaks, and must be punished. This is not a new playbook.

"NYC in particular suffers from rampant under-reporting on crime stats. "

How do you know this? Why aren't other cities affected by this under reporting?

Metrics-driven policing often gets the blame here: shifts in policing policy that hold individual precincts, officers, etc., directly responsible for crime statistics under their watch were initially successful in more efficiently allocating police resources, but have now created a set of perverse incentives that encourage officers to either not file reports or to down-classify reports into less-grave categories (reporting armed robbery as theft, etc.). These kinds of programs originated in NYC, as the "CompStat" program under Jack Maple and Bill Bratton, largely during the administration of Rudy Giuliani as mayor, but similar programs have since been adopted by (particularly urban) police departments across the country, to arguably similar both positive and negative effects. This kind of stats manipulation ("juking the stats") featured heavily in the TV show The Wire, for example, which is set in Baltimore.

So, to more directly answer your second question: other cities absolutely also suffer here, but New York has been at it the longest, and so is perhaps best known for this issue.

For more background, Reply All did a two-parter a few years ago exploring the history here, which is quite good. This is the first part: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34

I wasn't doubting that criminal stats can be manipulated or are unreliable.

I was asking for evidence that was the case for nyc and that it was such an extent as to change the danger of the city compared to others

No urban police department is going to care about your small time theft.

The primary difference I notice is that in SF, people seem to expect that the police will care about this? I am not sure why the expectations seem so different - perhaps it is the large number of people coming from more suburban parts of the country where the police do investigate these crimes?

They should.

And maybe, probably because they should be investigating these crimes.

It's misleading to look at 2019 crime data for San Francisco when the biggest reason for crime going up there recently was Chesa Boudin, who was only DA from 2020 to 2022.

These rates have gotten a lot higher during/post covid. 2019 data is pretty out of date considering that.

A lot has changed since 2019.

where is Camden and Compton on that list?

The Wikipedia list is the 2019 FBI UCR, but redacted for only the 100 most populous cities in America. So that would be cutoff at population ~225,000.

If you want to see stats for all cities, view the FBI UCR directly [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...].

e.g. NJ cities incl. Camden are at https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Interestingly, if I go to https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s the data stops at 2019. Now, if I look at 2018 snapshot, they have 2017 data: https://web.archive.org/web/20180303075305/https://ucr.fbi.g...

2019 snapshot has 2018 data: https://web.archive.org/web/20190508183318/https://ucr.fbi.g...

But there's no data after 2019 in any of the snapshots, up to 2023. I wonder what happened in 2020 that makes it impossible to collect any data since then...

SF's population is below 1MM

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