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Comment by jmacd | Hacker News Reader

I have a family member who is a police officer (investigator) in another country. I was telling them about this killing and how crazy things seemed in San Francisco during my last visit.

His first and only response was "well, how do you know that's even related? Most people get killed by somebody they know." and I was like "well, yeah, but San Francisco is bad right now" and the conversation moved on.

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It’s unclear from your anecdote if you either learned anything or came back to the conversation saying your family member’s hunch was right.

The implication here seems 'an expert' had a right intuition and disputed a widely believed initial claim.

Would have been helpful to be explicit here about it, as it otherwise just seems to end.

I guess I left it that way because I was relating how it felt at the time.

I mostly thought he was just... wrong. In retrospect it's interesting that his intuition was completely different than mine (and a lot of ours here).

What’s meaningful is how what feels like wide spread petty theft gives a real sense of lawlessness to the point where something like this feels inevitable. MANY of us assumed the worst, which is a sad state of affairs. I guess it’s good that it wasn’t seemingly random (although obviously horrific it happened at all), but I hope there is pressure on the city to clean up the other bits.

> but I hope there is pressure on the city to clean up the other bits.

Enough to displace the lobbying pressure imposed by the affluent side of it's population? I wouldn't hold my breath...

Bear in mind that there are people who dedicate their efforts toward making others feel that way, for fun and profit. There is a whole industry of 'crime porn' dedicated to telling people what they want to hear.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/cocaine-buffets-and-meth-poo...

His intuition is supported by sober experience and understanding of the data. Equating that to your intuition is exactly why so many folks here(and on twitter) got this wrong.

Mosts stats are like this when you start understanding the nuance. For example, the bike fatality rate. Its 36 people on average a year for LA county. You can't draw anything meaningful from that data at all. The county is 10 million people. What is even the variance year to year? It could be like the bulk of that number. That's just considering the statistics of the number and how rare these sort of incidents really are.

Now consider yourself versus the average bike rider you see. Are they wearing a helmet? Following traffic rules? Using lights? Taking the entire lane? Signalling? Making left turns from the perpendicular street instead of merging into the turn lane for cars? Chances are they might only be doing one or two of those things, but probably none of those things on average based on my own anecdata of what I see cyclists looking like in my city. If you consider riders who do all of these things, whats the fatality rate then? I'd bet its effectively zero a year.

Crime works accordingly. We hear people say how they think the murder rate is a good proxy for crime you'd experience in a city, since you can't really hide a body and fudge the stats like other crimes that might go unreported. However, the murder rate is also a case of a small number of occurances happening over a massive population, and probably subject to a lot of variation. Likewise, it probably disproportionately affects people in domestic violence altercations who already own a gun that they keep in the home and know their victim, then secondly people involved with organized crime. Avoiding these factors that put you at outsized risk might make the murder rate effectively zero for someone like you.

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