San Francisco, crime density, and the feeling of safety

Just want to point out that crimes/person and crimes/area are both perfectly good metrics, but crimes/(person×area) is a nonsensical metric that overemphasizes how small SF is

Breaking: more crowded places have more crime / sq. mileage

Lol…SF has a crime problem, but this one data point is misleading.

Crime /capita is far more relevant…and I imagine SF is still not great in that regard, but this article is pretty “meh”

FYI, OP submitted essentially the same story two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496700

I'm curious why this submission is lower ranked on the front page than numerous other article with fewer points submitted much less recently. This isn't the first time an article I've submitted about SF crime seemed to disappear from the front page very quickly.

The FBI discourages using their data for simplistic rankings [1]. The linked Wikipedia entry in the article [2] reiterates this in the section entitled "Criticism of ranking crime data". The simplest criticism is that crimes happen in San Francisco that involve people from outside San Francisco who are present there during a crime, but the denominator for per-capita data is the census data.

Ignoring all of that, I have to say that I continue to find it strange when people take total crime as a correlate of safety. Specifically, quotes like this from the article:

> So, what this tells us is that just by virtue of walking around San Francisco, you will witness and experience significantly more crime (235% the rate of Chicago and 266% the rate of Baltimore) than in any other city in the United States.

are pretty divorced from reality. If you instead sort the Wikipedia table by the violent crime rate, you have a totally different answer and conclusion.

Do people feel unsafe knowing that there are people shoplifting? 72% of the crime per capita in San Francisco is listed under Larceny/Theft. Only 8% is motor vehicle theft. And finally, another 8% is burglary, which involves actually forcibly entering a premises. Burglary is the primary form of theft that people usually associate with feeling unsafe. That's what Nat Friedman cited as his reason for leaving San Francisco [2]. Muggings are under violent crime, listed as Robbery, at 5% of total crime.

tl;dr: Total crime is a poor measure of safety. Simplistically using per-capita information is also explicitly discouraged for cross-location comparisons.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-statistics-their-proper-use

[2] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1644736970139267072

What are some of the safer neighborhoods in SF?

That's why I left CA in 2020. High taxes. Growing crime. Political BS.

That's why I left USA in 2022.

Crime isn’t up.