I don’t understand why it can’t be both: SF is degenerating when it comes to random crime AND this murder wasn’t by some random thug.
I remember reading blog after blog on HN about people moving out of SF specifically for what the city had become.
I remember reading blog after blog on HN about people moving out of SF specifically for what the city had become.
Always important to reflect on whether stances like "SF is degenerating" are based on a rational analysis of what is actually happening, versus a more emotional response to stories that might be more like the topic of this post, just with less visibility into the exact circumstances of what happened.
Not saying that's likely happening here, but the clear response to the original news was that this was the perfect example of what SF is becoming. How often does that assumption happen?
A blog post about a guy who didn't like the dog poo in the Mission is not nearly enough data to draw the conclusions most of us were drawing. That includes myself. But after the glaring intellectual lapses I engaged in subsequent to the Asian mass shootings and the killing of the crypto exec, the inner me is attempting to reassert rational order by demanding intellectual honesty and logic. All of which is now firmly demonstrating to me that facts don't care about feelings, and will gleefully bite you in the ass if they don't align with the world view or narrative that you're emotionally comfortable with.
Exactly. And it turns out we know the answer: California has been hemorrhaging residents for 30 years and they are overwhelmingly lower-income, albeit with a recent surge in higher-income departures which correlates with the shift to remote work.
https://www.ppic.org/blog/whos-leaving-california-and-whos-m... https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2020/01/not-the-gol...
It's the housing, y'all.
All of it.
The homelessness vastly out of proportion to the area's drug-addiction and mental-illness rates. The property crime. The exodus.
All of it. It's all the housing.
However, this comment is falling into the exact situation that OP was trying to warn about. You are using an anecdote to dismiss statistics because the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true. It is after all your own personal experience. However, that experience might not be an accurate representation of reality. OP warned to keep that in mind. Your response is effectively saying "no, my emotional narrative feels true so I'm sticking with it."
Maybe you are right and your emotional narrative is true. As I said, I don't know. But I'll tell you if one side of a debate has statistics and the other side has feelings, I think it is smart to side with the side that has statistics.
Minor crimes like murder?
Statistics also don't collect how many annoying people are blasting shitty music on subways or how many morons are rolling coal in lifted trucks. There are unpleasant people everywhere.
In that case, statistics should still be useful to observe trends, if they can't be used to determine accurate absolute numbers. We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100. Say that's 20%; seeing that number change from 200 to 20 is still teaches you about how crime rates change.
Besides, we're talking about murder, here, and I would suspect that pretty much every murder ends up accounted for in the statistics. Contrary to what mafia movies would like us to believe, it's not that easy to hide a body indefinitely.
> The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports.
While urine smells certainly affect quality of life, I'm not convinced this particular statistic is all that relevant when talking about crime or public safety.
This ignores changes in police enforcement and prosecution of crimes. If there is very little overall crime and the police have the time to find the perpetrator, and the prosecutor agrees to bring charges, you're more likely to report the crime. If there is high crime, police are too swamped to deal with yet another break-in, and the DA is too busy dropping felonies to misdemeanors or not bringing charges at all, then people aren't going to bother reporting crime as much anymore.
That's definitely not true for car break-ins. In California pretty much every one I knew who lived there experienced some form of car break-in, and of course nobody got their stuff back. If I experienced one there I'd just shrug it off as a fact of life since the process of filing a police report takes time and effort, and the reward is expected to be zero.
In other places with fewer break-ins, I will most likely respond differently.
Ok, here's my not cherrypicked experience: The issue is massively overblown. It's nowhere near as bad as the sour-grapes living elsewhere would have you believe.
I agree with you that crime stats can be politicized, but it's equally sketchy to consider n=1 anecdotes as more reliable indicators. Certainly if you yourself experience or are the victim of crime at some particular rate and intensity, then that's suggestive to you, personally. It's entirely logical to make decisions about your own life -- like moving to a safer neighborhood, or avoiding areas in the city where you've experienced crime -- but it's not particularly useful when talking about the city as a whole, or in making general recommendations to residents on how to be safe.
So there could be a 50% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city, along with a 500% increase in non-violent or petty crimes everywhere else: shoplifting, parked car smash-and-grabs, urinating in the train stations, pooping on the sidewalks, etc. So the tech crowd isn't going to notice fewer people getting murdered in the worst section of town, but they'll definitely see the other stuff.
Statistics can be useful, not useful, or misleading. Nothing about them is inherently meaningful or valuable--it depends entirely on the question and process generating the data and statistic. GIGO applies.
Despite the meme that an anecdote isn't data, it actually is no different from data from the Bayesian point of view. It is an n=1 posterior with a prior of one's past life experiences. And many anecdotes together can be thought of as a multi-level model (if you don't believe this, just see what the methodology of many behavioral/observational studies looks like--it's collating anecdotes into "data"--including the crime statistics that you are after).
> the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true
And researchers can absolutely be emotional! A study biased by the emotions and beliefs of a researcher will produce biased results. Statistics isn't an escape hatch from human bias; it actually compounds whatever bias exists in the first place.
Have you ever made friends with a homeless person? Do you know anyone who has been homeless in the past?
In my ~20y in SF, I have seen the exact same issues and political divides repeat over and over. There are certainly issues which need to be addressed, but the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration constantly leads to the reimplementation of solutions that do not work, particularly homeless sweeps and policing of nonviolent property crime.
Real solutions take time, commitment, dedication, and engagement from and with the community, not just shouting at a handful of politicians. That isn’t gratifying enough for most people, who want to see some overnight transformation, which is what leads to homeless people being shifted around from block to block based on who most loudly demands that seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.
Further, this strategy prolongs and ingrains people being stuck on the street. Having access to the resources that help people get off the street, heal from addiction, and not be so desperate as to engage in petty property crime for survival makes everyone safer, including the folks currently living on the street. Being able to establish semi-stable communities (“encampments”) where they can rely on each other to watch their property, often including medications, identifying paperwork, treasured possessions like family photo albums which keep them tethered to reality, is key to seeing them improve.
This is the strategy upon which navigation centers are built, and while not perfect, it works for a lot of people.
The, “tough on crime, I don’t want to see the homeless”, strategy which has continually failed for decades actually, counterintuitively to many people - esp newcomers’ - perception, makes us all less safe. If there has been a decline in SF since you’ve moved here, it is almost certainly because of these wasteful, costly, and dangerous approaches to public safety and health.
It doesn’t matter how many condo towers are built, SF is never going to be a gated community. If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.
I go back and forth on feelings of safety: I think in some ways I do feel less safe now than I did when I moved here, but part of that are the differences between my attitudes and lifestyle at ages 30 and 40. Logically, my risk level is probably much lower now than it was 10 years ago.
But there's also just general fear, especially when walking near someone who is screaming at the moon. Maybe that fear isn't entirely rational, but I think the fear more comes from unpredictability than anything else. A few years ago, my partner was standing on the Folsom/Embarcadero Muni platform, with 15 or so other people waiting for a train. A mentally-ill person came up onto the platform, occasionally ranting, walking past people standing there, when he, completely randomly and unpredictably, turned to someone waiting and punched him, hard, in the face (he doubled over, in pain, bleeding, his nose probably broken).
For better or worse, that incident comes to mind most of the time whenever I walk past a homeless person who seems to have mental health or addiction issues, no matter how likely or unlikely it is that they might attack me. Add on top of that the fact that police will do essentially nothing when an attack occurs, even when they witness it happen, and people know this and don't feel like they have somewhere to turn if something happens.
Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit, but I think my point is that people are afraid because they see a lot of weird, potentially dangerous things that don't fit into their view of what day-to-day life should be like, and they don't know what's going to happen to them in those situations. They hear stories -- even of isolated incidents -- like mine above, and that scares them.
I completely agree that police sweeps of tent encampments are not the answer. But I also think you're putting too nice a face on these encampments (not sure why you use scare quotes; that is literally what they are). You are almost certainly correct in what you see as the good aspects of these areas, but they also have significant downsides, as breeding grounds for drug use and other health issues.
For some out on the street, I truly believe involuntary commitment to some kind of mental health or addiction treatment center is the only real start to a solution. It can't stop there, of course: supportive housing, job training and placement, etc. is an absolute necessity. Getting someone clean and then throwing them back on the street is going to lead them right back where they were. But I'm tired of this idea that we're only allowed to help people who accept it. Refusing treatment or housing should not be an allowed option. "Tough on crime" is not the answer, but maybe some form of "tough love" is. I know California has a complicated (to put it mildly) history with forced mental health treatment, but that seems to be trotted out as an excuse to do nothing, and that's not ok either. To be clear, there are many who do want help, and accept it when offered, to varying degrees of success. But the most visible are those who have mental health and/or drug addiction issues, and asking or offering nicely often does not get us anywhere.
Define "short term". I have first met San Francisco in 2006. I have never actually lived there (first because I couldn't afford it, then because I didn't want to) but I visited it fairly regularly, at some periods of my life almost daily. At the beginning, is was a very nice place to visit. And then at some point I realized I don't actually want to go there anymore. At which precise point over the 17 years of this history that happened is hard for me to describe, but I can clearly see the contrast between where we started and where we ended up. It may be that living there all the time feels differently - I only have my perspective to it.
> seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.
This is really an unfair take, designed to shame the complainer rather than address the complaint. You are fully aware that the problems with SF go way beyond "seeing the poor" and that people that complain do not complain about "seeing the poor". Yes, people that cause these complaints are often poor - nobody would complain much about seeing a billionaire strolling through Market street - but pretending like them being "poor" is the sole basis of all the complaints is clearly not taking any of it seriously and just trying to blame the messenger. I guess it worked so well the last 15 years, keep doing it.
> is key to seeing them improve.
How has it been improving lately?
> strategy which has continually failed for decades actually
Yeah, true socialism has never been tried yet. Except SF didn't do anything like that for "decades" - the visible homelessness has been steadily increasing, and the enforcement of property crime has been steadily decreasing, to the point that it has been effectively legalized now.
> If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.
Well, that's pretty much what I did. Except where I live there's no need for gates - it's safe enough without them. And also clean enough. I hope one day it will be the same way in SF, at least as it was where I first met it 17 years ago, or better - but it's a hope beyond hope, because right now I witness people of SF doubling down hard on "how dare you to complain, you snobby rich fuck? Just smell the poop and shut up!" and "we need to legalize even more crime and do even less enforcement and then it surely will all work". Well, I guess we'll see how it will work out for you.
I've lived in SF for 13 years, which I know is not as long as many others, but I agree that quality of life has declined, at least in the time I've been here. But quality of life and crime rates are not the same thing. Certainly, increasing crime -- especially violent crime, but also property crime -- can decrease quality of life. But quality of life can be hurt by things that you can't easily qualify as worse crime: increased homelessness and drug use, especially when those things are much more visible and in-your-face, as they have been here. The smell of urine and having to step over human poop is a quality-of-life issue, not a crime issue.
And yes, while I assume peeing and pooping on sidewalks is at least a misdemeanor, drawing a direct line from that to "I'm gonna get assaulted or murdered" is the stretchiest of stretches.
But still, I totally get why all this stuff makes people feel less safe, even though the city (aside from a few neighborhoods that people should avoid, just like in nearly every other city in the world) on the whole is actually pretty safe, including when compared with decades ago.
But let's not conflate quality-of-life issues with crime. They are certainly intertwined in many ways, but they are not the same thing.
While stepping over poop or smelling urine on the street doesn't hurt me, it doesn't exactly make me happy to live here either.
(Fortunately I moved out of SoMa and into a nicer neighborhood a few years ago, so I don't have to deal with sidewalk piss and shit on a daily basis anymore.)
True. But if you say "shoplifting is not a crime anymore" and then citizens say "I am not going to report my car getting broken into because what's the use?" - then yes, crime rate statistics on these drops like a stone, but did we really improve anything here?
Interestingly, there's strong correlative evidence that wealth inequality is linked to increased crime in developed nations. So that's a fun fact!
But all the comments, tweets, etc immediately came out blaming SF government and SF's general crime problem specifically for Bob Lee's death. Like they couldn't just wait a teeny bit before forming an opinion after more facts were known? Especially from the crowd that prides itself on "logic" and "data driven" decisions.
You point out the falsity and people call you naive and say it's the crime stats that are wrong, not their take. Their version is reality.
As a San Francisco resident, I don't want us wasting time, energy and resources going after the wrong problems.
An undesirable place that washed up people ended up, riddled with crime and violence.
I think I might be getting the story wrong, but I recall hearing there used to be much more crime.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7126a1.htm
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. We're all afraid of all the wrong things.
I really don't understand what you're talking about.
I wouldn't put too much weight in those kinds of comments.
This isn't just some media driven hysteria.
I think where to draw the line is this "undesirable place" business. That's highly subjective, judgemental, and can cause you to lose sight of a lot.
But I think the belief/feelings that this translates to much worse crime is just not correct. I can sympathize and agree with the idea that homeless and drug problems makes SF less desirable, but I don't think it moves the needle that much on safety and crime.
The only reason I said this, is because I was there for Miami Music Week, and they had multiple shootings two years in a row. It also has a bit of a reputation from the "cocaine cowboys" years. Honestly, the city had a bit of a "feel" to it, but it also seemed to have a great amount of character.
I'm not really passing judgement myself. I live in a place that many people would call "undesirable", and it does hurt... it's also not really fair, because it's a beautiful city with rich culture heritage, and continuing culture.
However, we have lots of shootings here too, and I understand why people are a little apprehensive.
Conversely it’s also had a consistently higher property crime rate.
As to ease when you "start extremely high" -- SF is now safer, when it comes to violent crime, than most major cities in the US. What it does have is an extremely high rate of quality of life crime.
Interestingly, San Francisco's population declined from 775,000 in 1950 to 679,000 in 1980.
Sources:
Homicide in San Francisco, 1849-2003 (https://cjrc.osu.edu/research/interdisciplinary/hvd/united-s...)
Historical population of San Francisco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco) plus some linear interpolation
If a homeless person walks up to you and aggressively threatens you as you are passing by, no crime has occurred. But if you're an SF native, you've learned to shrug it off as a commonplace occurrence. You've learned to become thick skinned towards these incidences. And when a real crime has happened, you'd likely assign more gravitas to it.
This is why there is a disconnect between numbers and quoted statistics and how people feel.
Depending on what they say, isn't that still technically "assault"? Or "disturbing the peace"?
Also, if there's poop all over the sidewalks, those are all crimes too.
The problem is that all these petty crimes are generally never reported, and certainly not acted upon by police. So they never show up in the crime statistics.
There's a disconnect between the numbers and quoted statistics and reality, because the statistics come from the police, and their reporting isn't accurate. It isn't accurate anywhere of course, because police aren't perfect and many crimes go unreported for various reasons, but to SF natives, it may seem that this is worse in SF than other places, or in SF in earlier times.
Some guy / lady yelled at you for 10 seconds aggressively. Are you now going to call the cops / file a police report?
I think a majority of people would just move on with their day. So yes, to your point, this wouldn't show up in any statistics.
That's why we call them scapegoats right? That's what people who scapegoat others do.
Logic, Rational Thought, Dispassionate Analysis, these are all good. And one day, all humans will hopefully practice these disciplines as a matter of course. But right now, the vast majority of people are controlled by their emotions. What do they want to be true? What do they wish to be true?
Well, that's what becomes "true". At least, true to them.
https://sfstandard.com/perspectives/perspective-why-your-cha...
Swathes of homeless living in tents is not a crime. So is being screamed at by a drugged maniac. You also won‘t see people openly shooting up or defecating on the street in these stats.