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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

> San Francisco isn't anywhere close to most dangerous city in the United States.

See cheeseblubber's comment[1] which cites[2]: "With a crime rate of 54 per one thousand residents, San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18." It goes on to compare with NY[3]: "The chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime in New York is 1 in 40."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35454781

[2] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#des...

[3] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/new-york/crime#descript...

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Your comparing a safe big city to the safest big city. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I didn't say SF was the safest city in the country.

> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

“San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities.”

The definition of danger is

'able or likely to cause harm or injury.'

From Google/Oxford.

I said

"San Francisco isn't anywhere close to *most dangerous city* in the United States."

You conflating property crime with violent crime is disingenuous at best on your part.

> You conflating property crime with violent crime is disingenuous at best on your part.

No, it's just a definition of "dangerous" much closer to Merriam-Websters' first entry for the word[1]:

"involving possible injury, pain, harm, or loss"

If you do not consider carjackings, break-ins, burglaries, and the like to be dangerous, we simply have different working definitions, that's all.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dangerous

Does San Francisco have a lot of carjackings, break-ins, and burglaries? I've never heard of San Francisco having frequent carjackings or break-ins, or even burglaries. It's mostly petty theft like smashing a car window or stealing a bike.

You're trying to use the amount of petty theft, which does suck, to pretend that San Francisco is a dangerous city, which its not.

If you look at just violent crimes, San Francisco isn't in the conversation.

> Does San Francisco have a lot of carjackings, break-ins, and burglaries?

Vehicle thefts and carjackings spike in major US cities[1]: "The number of carjackings - defined as auto theft or attempted theft by force or threat - rose by 24% in seven cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis, Norfolk and San Francisco."

Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says[2]

Perhaps most tellingly[3]:

"In September 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a poll of 1,653 city residents found that over the past five years, 45% of San Francisco residents had been the victim of theft and 24% had been either been threatened with violence or had been the victim of a violent crime.[4]"

> If you look at just violent crimes

If we are shifting the conversation from "dangerous" to "violent", I would certainly agree with you. My concern is similar to that expressed by huevosabio[5] based on his experience in Mexico: "Every crime that goes unprosecuted is an invitation for a repeat crime. This is as true in Juarez as it is in San Francisco."

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64414985

[2] https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/nearly-half-of-san-f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_San_Francisco

[4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sfnext-poll-crime-sfp...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457841

>"The number of carjackings - defined as auto theft or attempted theft by force or threat - rose by 24% in seven cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis, Norfolk and San Francisco."

Cool. If your town has one carjacking, and the next it has two, thats a big increase. So again, I'll repeat, does San Francisco have a lot of carjackings?

>Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says

Yes, petty theft is rampant there.

>If we are shifting the conversation from "dangerous" to "violent",

Just to clarify, we were always talking about violent crimes. Carjacking and break-ins are violent crimes. Petty theft is not. The conversation is not "shifting", you are just applying the word dangerous to situations where it doesn't apply.

>My concern is similar to that expressed by huevosabio[5] based on his experience in Mexico: "Every crime that goes unprosecuted is an invitation for a repeat crime. This is as true in Juarez as it is in San Francisco."

That's irrelevant to our conversation.

There's really no good stats on SF car jackings, unfortunately. The SFPD crime data is too coarse to discriminate carjackings from other car theft. I think the best you could do, unfortunately, is comb news stories and try to get a sense of the frequency. A quick google search turns these up:

Dec 22: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/crime/man-shot-during-attemp...

Feb 6th: https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/assault-carjacking-suspect-a...

Feb 21st (and mentions a second Nov 7th): https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/armed-carjackings-near-s...

Mar 1st: https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/teens-carjack-couple...

You could perhaps automate something to give you a proxy statistic. Hell, it may end up a better statistic than what the SFPD has.

I did the math. SF is 2.6x more dangerous per sq mi than any other US city

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496700

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/105IDODri5Qbi3Mj-SGHF...

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