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A single Target downtown accidentally started reporting all shoplifting incidents and _tripled_ the citywide rate: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Targ...

A teacher was beaten deaf by one of their students at a middle school and was stopped from reporting the assault to the police: https://missionlocal.org/2022/04/total-meltdown-at-everett-m...

The local crime statistics are not reliable. Even homicides, which tend to be hard to underreport, should be used very carefully since 600+ people die every year from "drug overdose" which is not categorized as a homicide but very well should be.

Data that can be manipulated will be manipulated; especially if there's power/money on the line.

Even things like hospitals reporting stabbings can be manipulated, intentionally or otherwise; if "intentional stabbing" requires reporting and paperwork that "accidentally fell on a knife" both the healthcare providers and the victim may prefer the second - think gang violence where neither side wants the cops involved.

Many stores there take special safety measures like locking items up. Unlike politicians and research groups, their own money is directly at risk if they over/underreact, so I trust those signs more.

Yeah it sure is hard to believe that shoplifting is a non-issue when all the stores are reducing hours and putting merchandise behind an expensive to install and operate lock and key system.

""drug overdose" which is not categorized as a homicide but very well should be"

An abrupt 'rise in homicide' caused by changing the definition will just undermine the credibility of the numbers.

Dealing with statistical discontinuities with reporting is kind of unrelated to whether the existing definitions properly represent the territory they claim to map.

Changing definitions can make the new data seem unreliable, but bad definitions make the data actually unreliable. Those are different kinds of problems.

Unless the law changes to make drug companies culpable in this situation (which is my interpretation of the post I replied to) then as things stand the definition does indeed represent the territory.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but pharmaceutical opioids haven’t been a big source of problem for at least a decade at this point.

That has historically been a motivation for organizations, governments, etc, to DO such a change, rather than to avoid it...

Regarding the second link, why would the school administration want to prevent this from being reported to the police?

There is an ascendence of belief that all matters of interpersonal conflict must be dealt with through non-police solutions. (This school used to have an on-site officer who was removed years ago.) It’s also probably bad for a school in terms of education regulations to have students, teachers, and admins regularly reporting assaults on campus. There’s likely a healthy dose of magical thinking involved as well about how to intervene when students are behaving anti socially.

I don’t have a simple answer. I’m mostly surprised that the teacher’s union tacitly supports this sort of outcome.

Crime is always at record lows when we ask police why they aren't doing their jobs, and crime is suddenly an urgent crisis when the police department comes to taxpayers to ask for another pay bump and more equipment.

The quote is from a police commissioner, not the police. SF's police commission is a civilian oversight board over the police. They do not have incentive to downplay crime or to increase police pay.

The SF police commission members definitely have an incentive to downplay crime: if they thought crime was a problem, they wouldn't have been nominated to the commission! (The Board of Supervisors, for example, recently pulled a political maneuver to extend the term of a commission member who effectively wants to dismantle the police force before they would lose the votes to do so: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-mayor-s-offi...).

Straw man. One can (soundly) believe crime is a problem without believing police are the only solution to that crime.

In theory yes, but the specific politics of police abolition mean it’s hard to get votes to defund the police if the public thinks crime is a problem. This is why the same politicians claiming to defund the police in 2020 and asking for more policing in 2023. There are very few electeds who argue both that crime is a growing problem and we should reallocate budgets away from policing.

I experienced a very similar situation in Denver before I decided to leave. From friends and acquaintances I gather that Portland and Seattle are in similar situations as well. NYC doesn't seem quite as bad, but it's definitely trending in a similar direction.

All of these arguments over crime rates and policing remind me a lot of The Wire, especially Season 3. For those who haven't watched it, it deep dives into the relationship between crime on the street and the high-level political maneuvering to which those crimes are merely an inconvenience, not a problem that needs fixing. Lots of pressure from folks at the top of city government to reduce numbers, rather than fixing the issues. And the frustration at the bottom of that pile, when everyday police officers realize they can't fix structural problems.

Makes me wonder what happened to make US cities so much better in the 2010s. Is it just a prosperity thing related to tech wealth? Because it feels like these exact issues were a huge problem in the 90s, and they somehow got better for a decade and a half before covid brought them back worse than ever.

> Makes me wonder what happened to make US cities so much better in the 2010s. Is it just a prosperity thing related to tech wealth? Because it feels like these exact issues were a huge problem in the 90s, and they somehow got better for a decade and a half before covid brought them back worse than ever.

These were issues in the 90s, and then Giuliani in NY and Riordan in LA spearheaded large cities adding more police officers, a trend which continued until the present day.

I have lived in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle since the pandemic started and while Portland and Seattle have gotten worse, they don’t hold a candle to how dangerous San Francisco has become. There are parts of San Francisco I won’t walk around in the day time. There simply isn’t anywhere like the tenderloin or SOMA in either Portland or Seattle.

Witness the cash app CEO desperately trying to get attention of passing cars and no one gives a fuck to see him bleeding out in the street

https://www.usasupreme.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/cahs-a...

rotten.

> Makes me wonder what happened to make US cities so much better in the 2010s.

It may just be anecdata but from what I remember you had much more "pockets" of bad areas, often which would be pushed just outside the city limits into a neighboring city.

But even accounting for that total statewide numbers seemed lower.

> Lots of pressure from folks at the top of city government to reduce numbers, rather than fixing the issues.

This is what I see too, and it seems glaringly obvious. Progressives want to reduce the incarceration rate, and any DA (or anyone in government really) will want to reduce the crime rate. By not prosecuting criminals, and facilitating the underreporting of crime, they get both. It makes absolutely no sense to me for a DA to unilaterally decide to prosecute less without any kind of corresponding change to how the police operate. If criminals know they won't be punished, and the issues that are causing them to commit crimes haven't been fixed, they will commit more crimes.

> "in Austin which, for example, their roads feel more like being in a MadMax movie than orderly transportation."

I'm sorry but having lived in both the Bay and Austin/Dallas I disagree. A guy tried to ram me with his vehicle going north on 101 near Palo Alto of all places, Texas has been tame in comparison.

Idk about Texas, but Palo Alto driving is pretty tame. People let you change lanes easily.

> “A small minority has tried to weaponize this tragedy to advance a narrative about a crime wave that just isn’t borne out by the data in San Francisco,” Kevin Benedicto, a police commissioner and lawyer, said on Thursday. At a commission meeting earlier in the week, Mr. Benedicto complained that some on social media “are exploiting this horrific incident for political gain.”

When someone makes spiteful accusations based on thin air it usually is a based on a reflection of themselves; AKA confession through projection.

Who usually weaponizes tragedies about crime waves?

Who usually misuses or misreport the city's crime data?

Who usually complains on social media for political gain?

The answer to all three of your questions is “anyone who thinks they’ll benefit from doing so.” To claim any of those things are unique to one group is ridiculous.

I agree with Mr. Benedicto. I think all the tough on crime shit doesn't work and it's a huge distraction from solving issues in San Francisco. Our recall of the district attorney was a huge waste of time. We now have a DA who has the mayor's approval and the support of the tough on crime jackals and nothing has changed, actually people say it's gotten worse since then. Because as recall opponents have said from the start, the causes of crime are more complicated than who the district attorney is.

That's not projection, that's being pissed off at political misinformation. It's a line straight out of Trump speeches, "carnage in our cities" and all that, it isn't reality based and it helps no one.

Tough on crime policies can mean a lot of things, but more police officers on the streets definitely improve both crime rates and the perception of safety. So does higher rates of clearance and prosecution. This is not a controversial fact in research. The question is always whether it's worth the cost, since police departments are very expensive.

No, it is not uncontroversial. The current wave of this thinking is a rehashing of the '80s and '90s crime wave politics. Increased prosecution and incarceration is a harmful consequence of that, one we should not repeat.

Why doesn't it work when it's worked for NYC?

At extremes "tough on crime" obviously works; if every person who ever did a crime was summarily executed by the state, very quickly you'd run out of crime-doers.

Obviously, even the worst societies have considered "death for every offense" a bit too tough.

The problem is complex and involves multiple things - any "simple" solution likely has glaring issues.

And a glib answer to some of these could be "NYC cracked down on crime so criminals moved elsewhere, perhaps to San Francisco".

More policing and consistent prosecution also work at the margins, not just the extremes.

I don't know what you mean. Perhaps you're referring to the popular myth that Giuliani cleaned up New York?

What actually happened is that crime declined everywhere starting around 1994. Same reasons Dolores Park is now routinely filled with yuppies instead of gang violence.

It created other socio-economics problems.

'Tough on crime' is a short-sighted solution.

I was referring to specific policies. Tough on crime is a political label that could mean anything.

Fair enough.

I work on this topic professionally and have been a paid consultant to the San Francisco District Attorney office under George Gascon and Chesa Boudin. I’m happy to hear evidence that more foot patrols, increased clearance rates, and increased prosecution don’t decrease crime rates or the perception of public safety.

You're conflating a lot of things.

I've seen a paper that suggests increasing a police force by X (I forget the number) reduces murder by 1 per year. That's probably the best thing I've seen supporting your views and it's pretty weak and impractical. I'd say this is probably correlation rather than causation.

But the idea that increased prosecution prevents crime is absolute horse shit. Prosecution is too late to intervene. The crime has already occurred. When a crime rate increases, new people committing new crimes will grow faster than the system can punish people for old ones. The people committing property crime in SF (note that that's the actual issue, violent crime is low despite this freak incident) are not thinking rationally about the consequences or lack thereof either.

> Prosecution is too late to intervene. The crime has already occurred.

Wrong. A small number of people commit most crimes. They have plenty of crimes to commit in the future if able.

> The people committing property crime in SF (note that that's the actual issue, violent crime is low despite this freak incident) are not thinking rationally about the consequences or lack thereof either.

Wrong at multiple levels. Violent crime rates are high for the demographics, among other things.

Property crime like smash and grabs, home invasions, catalytic converter thefts are conducted by professional crime rings with sophisticated operations.

> They have plenty of crimes to commit in the future if able.

You're thinking of recidivism completely wrongly.

> Violent crime rates are high for the demographics, among other things.

This is false. The information is available to you.

There's a difference with dispensing over-harsh punishments and actually addressing and responding to crimes promptly and efficiently, the later which SF is clearly not doing.