Due to the very real issue of police brutality in SFPD, local politicians are opposed to increasing funding for SFPD without oversight, and a number of politicians want to decrease it due to their police brutality record.
That said, SFPD is having a hard time retaining and hiring officers as they can get better salaries elsewhere in the Bay with less overtime. Fresh out of Academy cops in San Jose can earn a $111k base that caps at $189k, but SFPD's starting base is $103k and caps at $147.5k. Even factoring overtime, SFPD comes out to less than SJPD for hours worked, and other richer suburbs can pay even more than either wth even less hours.
Add to that politicization of the SF DA's office and Public Defender's office for the exact same reason (pay sucks so political hacks from both sides of the aisle fight for control) and you have dysfunctional local law enforcement.
On top of all that, SF had massively redeveloped a lot of formerly redlined neighborhoods (Western Addition/Hayes Valley, Mid-Market/Civic Center, Mission Bay+Potrero/Hunters Point) which in turn displaced those who couldn't afford to move to cheaper working class suburbs like Antioch and Vallejo.
Add to that the very real issue of neighboring states and cities (both Republican like Nevada in the 2010s and Democrat like NYC in the late 2010s to present) bussing their basket case issues out to San Francisco.
All this lead to the dysfunction that is seen today in San Francisco.
SF has very high property and overall crime rates. This is objective fact. It has the 4th highest property crime rate in the country, and the 7th highest overall crime rate in the country[1][2].
However, the _violent_ crime rate is only slightly above average in SF. Some people don't care much about the rampant theft; they still feel safe.
The same is true of e.g. the homelessness and drug issues. There are objectively more homeless people & drug addicts laying out on the sidewalks in SF. Some people don't care, some people are really bothered by this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[2] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#des...
SF has reached a tipping point and the wildly inflated values of multi-million dollar condos and trophy commercial buildings are falling fall enough to start putting serious wealth at risk.
No one likes walking down the street and seeing a guy yelling incoherently at passing cars, or getting on a subway car and finding someone sprawled across one of the benches smelling like shit.
Please give it a rest. That things were even worse under Dinkins is no reason we should tolerate things getting worse now.
How about we try to make things better instead of trying to sound smart by explaining that axtually this is not nearly as bad as the bubonic plague?
On the other side you have idealistic liberals who want to solve the problem by adding more social services but taking no further action.
This is likely a problem created by extreme wealth inequality and the fix is probably not what the posters on this site would be interested in entertaining.
1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up.
2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared.
It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it.
3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
No, the statistics show that reports to the police are going down. The reports are NOT going down because crime is going down; they are going down because victims are less and less likely to report the crimes.