How Safe Is SF? | Hacker News Reader

How Safe Is SF?

howsafeissf.com

30 pointsHudZah49 comments

A better title for this website might be "Where are crimes reported in SF?" -- it does not help us understand or contextualize how "safe" SF is overall compared to anything else, or even understand the types of crimes reported and whether that impacts your personal safety.

I think the implied effect was to understand how safe a neighborhood in SF is. Partially because I moved here a week ago and didn't really understand what to avoid. This was a quick project, but yes, showing the type of crimes is important. Though generally, most crimes affect the safety of an area, which is the assumption I went with

Classic crime reporting pet peeve: Market & Powell is right in front of the Westfield. Obviously there's more property crime there.

When Police would over rely on heatmaps for their patrol routes, they always ended up spending too much time in front of Walmarts and not enough in neighborhoods.

Anecdotally, crime in SF is far worse than what's reported. Police won't even show up for your smashed windows.

>Anecdotally, crime in SF is far worse than what's reported. Police won't even show up for your smashed windows.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

Last I was there, a Burger King had smashed windows and was serving customers like nothing happened. Didn’t even clean the shards, just put some yellow tape in the area.

Something looks wrong with the month-by-month graph... I'd expect December and January to be close to each other, but they are radically discontinuous. That's a priori very surprising.

Two of the intersections mentioned (boardman & Bryant, eddy & jones) are where police stations are. Is there a problem with the data where they just use the location of the police station by default?

> eddy & jones

Anecdotally that intersection is sketch as hell, even with the police department right there.

A deeply rooted issue, as in Paris: lot of people in denial and a very taboo topic, hence no will to fix the issues.

The visualizations you created may help to realize the scale of the issue, so this is helpful.

I wonder what's the mechanism for having people not discuss crime as they see fit. Is it only the free press doing tabooing?

It could also be a very practical issue; if the city is known as having crime, it may deter some employees to come working here or they may defend more their right to work from home.

When I went to San Francisco, I was very surprised by the difference between reality, and the picture that the company shared with me.

>I wonder what's the mechanism for having people not discuss crime as they see fit. Is it only the free press doing tabooing?

It's government and the press. From 2017: "BART Withholding Surveillance Videos Of Crime To Avoid 'Stereotypes'" <https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...>

(And before you say "A-ha, this is proof that the press does not censor itself!", did you know of this specific case before today? How has this not been widely discussed in society for the past seven years?)

Complaining about crime is right-coded so it could lead to social complications which incentivizes people to stay silent about it.

Gentrification is also a contributor to the problem but it's hard to tell rich people that without them getting mad and blaming someone/something else.

That may be true but I don't think it has much to do with the reluctance to discuss the issue (or to actively play down the importance of it when discussed.)

The only solution for either side is to move away, and if the rich people refuse to pack up and leave the less fortunate sure as hell aren't going to buy themselves plane tickets and skedaddle.

So it kinda makes sense why people downplay it when the only alternative to moving somewhere else is perpetuating false victimhood.

What? I've been to SF hundreds of times and have never once felt unsafe. You are just pushing right wing propaganda at this point.

This does not address the safety of SF relative to other areas, adjusted for population and other pertinent factors. SF is wildly safer than the zeitgeist seems to suggest. San Francisco's overall crime rate has been decreasing, not increasing. Sure, we can have a discussion about reporting rates and adjust for those. As far as I've read, homelessness, a separate but interdependent issue, does not necessarily correlate with crime with any r^2 worth mentioning.

> San Francisco's overall crime rate has been decreasing, not increasing.

How much of this is due to reduced reporting? I'm 100% willing to believe that overall crime is decreasing in reality and not just on paper, but there's a pretty convincing narrative that the decline on paper is a result of people just not filing police reports for crimes they know won't be investigated.

Anecdotal, but my neighborhood police chief (Ingleside) recently shared that thefts are down across the board in her reporting area. Seems backed up by aggregate reports: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/san-francisco-crim... (She attributed it to the plainclothes retail ops they've been doing leading to significant arrests, and the DA prosecuting a bunch of theft over the past year)

Reminds me of chicagocrime.org back in the day. Everything seems to cycle every twenty years. Enjoy the ride, kids.

https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/

You can't know how safe SF is from the official data, because they release criminals without charges. Most recent high profile example: Golden Gate bridge "protesters".

Honest question: Why do so many good companies {OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.} continue to set up offices in the highest-crime neighborhoods of SF (most notably: Mission and the vinicity of Market)?

I feel like they would do their less-physically-tough employees (women, people with disabilities, physically smaller men) a HUGE favor by moving to Potrero Hill or some other safer neighborhood.

I shouldn't have to fear for my physical safety to get to/from work. I live in a very low-crime area for a reason.

A level of grittiness has been long sought after by innovators, artists, writers, and the like. Too much comfort is not good for creative endeavors because you quickly become out of touch.

I'll believe that when I see the mansions of the company owners and top management in the middle of such areas.

In other words - like every other city on Earth, there are "good" neighborhoods and "bad" neighborhoods.

At first I wanted to criticize this comment as being a gross oversimplification of the city’s crime rates. After some thought though, there is a lot to be desired from the author’s when it comes down to contextualizing the data.

I mean, can the notion of safety really be relayed by showing a person a bar graphs and telling them to avoid the tall cities?

Apparently this is a hobby project though, so I think I’m expecting too much.

With this in mind, good work, HudZah.

and then there's sixth street, south of market.

I really like the layout of this page (and the design of the authors homepage -- https://www.hudzah.com/) . Feels like it could also be used on more positive content.

Source code anywhere?

https://github.com/HudZah/HowSafeIsSF

They didn't normalize the data?

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Yeah, they didn't. Worse,

> it's clear that some areas experience significantly higher crime rates than others.

(emphasis mine)

"crime rates" — but then the data immediately after that is incident counts. The word "rate" means to measure some quantity against another, usually to find a frequency. And here, that would be per capita.

(The chart Y axis labels are also lopped off. E.g., the max on the one chart for me reads "0,000".)

Why is this flagged?

I've seen lots of things flagged because they arent flattering to the majority of the HN populus...

They come to the conclusion that their crime numbers are reflecting underlying density differences, but then don't redo the analysis with a per-capita control? Seems like, without that, this isn't a very useful presentation.

Yes, they don't actually answer the question of how safe SF is. They say that some areas are more safe than others. Is the worst area in SF unsafe at all, or are the absolute numbers (and per capita) actually low? How unsafe? Who should be concerned about doing what, and when?

100% I was thinking the same thing. Shouldn’t be too hard to account for density

Will do so, this was a quick project that I was curious about since I moved here last week

One thing to note is that SF's population swells greatly during the day [1] as people commute into the city for work (Less than before the pandemic, but still substantial). So per-capita crime might still not be the best metric to use because it would be misleading.

[1] "San Francisco leads the Bay Area in attracting the most workers from outside its boundaries, with a net inflow of more than 200,000 commuters each day" https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/commute-patterns

what's fascinating is the portrayal of SF on Fox News vs Threads.

this data would leave you thinking valencia st is worse off than soma

You step out of the car and hear a female voice in the background: "Level 3, start"

Crime maps often just turn into population density maps. I always want to see these per capita. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1138/

The list of crimes counted includes: ...Larceny Theft, Malicious Mischief, Assault, Burglary, Motor Vehicle Theft, Fraud, Lost Property, Warrant, Drug Offense, Robbery, Missing Person and more.

It doesn't seem like "Warrant" (someone with a warrant is apprehended?), "Missing Person", or "Drug Offense" are relevant to general safety.

The author concludes with:

We notice this more when analyzing the heatmap of incidents. Incidents across Mission are much more spread out than incidents across Tenderloin. Therefore, it's unfair to say that the neighborhoods are equally dangerous.

I am not sure why it is not fair to say the neighborhoods are equally dangerous! Notably, the author does not tell us what it is fair to say. What does the degree of dispersion tell us about which one is more dangerous?

An area where it is common for someone with an arrest warrant to be apprehended seems reasonable to be considered unsafe.

Similarly for an area where people go missing.

Getting arrested for drug use in San Francisco is pretty hard to do - if someone accomplishes it you probably wouldn't want to be around them.

Why? If the three only crime reported in a neighborhood is a bunch of arrest warrants, why is that less safe than a place that has a bunch of violent crimes reported? I think you are implying that as neighborhood that has a bunch of criminals is inherently unsafe. But it is only unsafe if those people commit crimes there. There may be a relation, there may not be one.

I think this is basically the right insight, yes.

At the level of a state, there is probably a close connection between warrants served there and crimes committed there, because most people spend most of their time in one state. At the level of neighborhoods, though, there probably isn't, because most people travel across numerous neighborhoods every day and warrants are served wherever it happens that the criminal is found by police or stopped for an unrelated reason.

My thoughts are to represent general crime around the areas represent it's safety. The best way to normalize the data is viewing the crimes per capita, in which case Tenderloin is the highest. It's not fair; simply because the Mission is much larger in area.

Either way, I will be making updates to the site and data with time, this was a quick 1 day project!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com