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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

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This to an extent true - crime statistics are showing a downward trend in general.

However, it cannot be denied that some US cities' downtowns are... not great. I was in San Francisco a year ago, and in Los Angeles a few months ago, and I wouldn't want to live in either of those. Mass visible homelessness, visible drug use, etc. are not things people want to see or endure (of course I doubt that the people living through that want it either, in large parts). And I'm saying this as someone living in the Paris area who has visited large parts of the metro area, and knows the "bad" parts around here - it isn't even close how horrifyingly bad LA and SF are.

Some big cities do such a good job managing this.

I'm a huge fan of North America in general but US + Canadian cities just don't do a good job with this for some reason. Conservative, liberal, big, small; downtown cores all over North America are doing very poorly. I wonder if it's all down to the opioid crisis over here.

> US + Canadian cities just don't do a good job with this for some reason. Conservative, liberal, big, small; downtown cores all over North America are doing very poorly. I wonder if it's all down to the opioid crisis over here

I think that urbanism, or the absolute catastrophe that Anglophone North American is, is a big part of the problem.

People live far away from where they work, and downtowns are almost exclusively offices/commercial spaces. There is little reason to be there outside of working, so, outside of the obvious waste, during economic downturns and/or remote work spikes, there won't be a lot of people there. This leaves lots of abandoned/barely used space for people who have lost their work/housing to go to (the lack of social safety nets, especially in the US, contributes to these numbers).

> visible drug use, etc. are not things people want to see or endure (of course I doubt that the people living through that want it either, in large parts).

This isn't a safety risk in the same way that violent crime is.

Are they not extremely correlated?

Are they? Or is this a bias?

What do the experts say, and what data are they using to base their statements?

I'll let you interrogate the data. But the link is pretty clear and obvious to most https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/42/1/103/5917211

I walked into a Walmart in urban California last week and the men's socks were stored in locked cabinets. I don't need statistics to tell me that the crime in that neighborhood is off the charts and it's not a place I want to live or work.

Are there safe parts of most cities? Sure! But life is usually more complicated than "that's just a {insert my political adversary} talking point", and this is definitely one of those cases.

I don't know whether it's driven by shoplifting, or maybe the company being "proactive".

At least 2 Target stores here, in a very expensive university town, have recently installed rows of locked glass door cabinets, for securing products like... soap.

One of the locations, I'd expect to have some shoplifting shrink, though not too bad. The other location, a lot less.

(Also, anecdotally, the employees seem more aggressive lately about approaching people to "help". Which tends to come across as insincere and likely a Loss Prevention tactic, which is creepy and offensive, and makes me leave ASAP. Which I guess they might chalk up as an LP win. Nope, I was there to conduct commerce. Now they've made me dislike in-store shopping as much as I dislike their often abysmal Web order pickup experience. They're not nearly the worst store, brick&mortar or online, but I don't understand why they're moving in the direction of trashy with the image.)

Daily necessities being locked up is evidence that petty crime like shoplifting may be up. People shoplift necessities when they can't afford them. Nobody is stealing socks for meth money, they're stealing because their feet are cold and they don't have the money to pay.

And why, you might ask, is shoplifting up? Might have something to do with the historically horrific levels of income inequality in the US.

No, actually—shoplifting may have historically been primarily for personal use, and that may still be the primary cause by number of shoplifters, but organized gangs of shoplifters who steal large amounts of stuff to resell online are very much a thing [0] that's widely reported on [1] across many news outlets [2] and government groups [3].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/organized-crime-rings-p...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-04/eight-ar...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/business-health-government-and-po...

[3] https://www.chp.ca.gov/notify-chp/organized-retail-theft-pro...

> Nobody is stealing socks for meth money, they're stealing because their feet are cold and they don't have the money to pay.

Or, they might be stealing these items to resell. This is the case in NYC.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/organized-theft-ring-that-ta...

>historically horrific levels of income inequality in the US.

You can have high inequality and low % of extreme poverty

I think this is just a Walmart thing. I saw the same thing in a Canadian mountain resort town and it made me laugh out loud.

I live in South America and I've never seen such products locked up in a supermarket.

Usually it's just liquor and cigarettes if there's anything locked up at all.

This kind of stuff is so funny to me, because it's ignorant of every other store nearby.

You know what I did in Seattle a few months ago? I walked into a Target and they had everything locked up behind cabinets. The entire place looked like it was ransacked, with most of the shelves empty.

I went next door to the Safeway and the HMart. Literally not even a block away, and nothing was locked up, the shelves were stocked and everything was fine. That Target wasn't even in a high crime neighborhood; it was just mismanaged to shit.

I've definitely seen this with Targets, but I have a lot more confidence in Walmart's ability to tolerate a decent amount of shrinkage in order to avoid customer inconvenience. When I see a Walmart acting this way I get worried.

I've been to Walmarts in the ass-end of nowhere that have stuff locked up. The shrinkage problem is in part because of the self-checkout hole these stores have dug themselves into and the fact that staffing continues to dwindle.

Where in Seattle does an H Mart, Target, and Safeway co-exist within a block of each other?

The Target is now closed (for 'retail crime' reasons) , but this was in the UDistrict. It's only slightly embellished, since the Safeway is approximately one block north of the Target's prior location (4535 University Way NE) and then the HMart about one and a half blocks down.

The same thing happens in a Walmart on 5th Avenue. You would need statistics.

The same thing does not happen in my local Walmart. The only things behind locked cabinets are expensive electronics.

I'm not sure what 5th Avenue you're talking about, but I'd be very surprised if crime in that neighborhood isn't much higher than crime in mine.

Statistically safe maybe, but speaking for Manhattan the streets have plenty of unsavory and seemingly-unsafe people around. I have a close friend who worked at an office a block away from a methadone clinic (in a busy part of midtown) and the clients would be hanging around the neighborhood propositioning people while the police did nothing. And this was before 2020.

The perception of safety is almost as important as safety itself. The visible, chronically homeless population is as visible and challenging for citizens to deal with as ever. Leaving these people to the streets is bad for everyone and definitely makes NYC feel much less safe than it might actually be.

> most cherry picked of statistics

Isn't it true that another big talking point that lots of "petty" crime is now decriminalised so we're not comparing apples to apples if "progressive" leaders are massaging the stats.

Maybe if you stay in the heavily policed portions where rich people live. Try going downtown within 3 miles of the ubiquitous homeless encampments though...

Nobody ever claims that suburban areas are crime-ridden. “Cities are safe,” which ones?

You're much more likely to be seriously injured or killed in an auto accident than you are as the victim of a random violent crime.

Only because many places (like NYC) don't count violent crimes as violent. If a mentally deranged vagrant runs up to you and punches you hard in the face, knocking you to the ground before running off, in NYC that is considered 3rd degree assault - a non-violent misdemeanor. On the rare occasion when this violent lunatic is caught, he is given an appearance ticket and released - non violent misdemeanors like this aren't "bail eligible". In a massive portion of these cases, the prosecutor will simply drop the charges. On the very, very rare occasion when it does go to trial the lunatic is deemed "not fit to stand trial" and simply released back onto the street. In all of these events, this is not recorded as a violent crime, so people with their head in the sand can wave their hands in the air and talk about how there is no violent crime in the city. But the often traumatized person who has been a victim of this violent assault now suffers from the memory of being attacked - more so because they know their attacker faces absolutely no sanction and is back out on the street. People who live in the city and ride the subway are constantly menaced, harassed and/or assaulted and that is an extremely unfriendly and dangerous environment to live in, even if it doesn't show up in the sanitized statistics.

only if you constrain yourself to "violent claim reported to and investigated by police"

I've received more harrassment on busses and trains that I've had car incidents, and I've spent much more time in car compared to public transit.

This unhelpful whataboutism doesn’t refute earlier claims in this thread nor does it reinforce any opposite claims. What are you trying to say about the safety of cities here?

I'm saying that the safety of suburbs is overstated due to the higher number of vehicle miles travelled.

> I'm saying that the safety of suburbs is overstated due to the higher number of vehicle miles travelled.

Let's see..

Representing city: traffic fatalities in San Francisco in 2021: 30 [0]

Representing suburbia: traffic fatalities in Palo Alto in 2020: 4 [1]

(On a quick search I didn't find stats for exact same year, but these are pretty close for a sense of scale.)

[0] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fata...

[1] https://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Palo-Alto-California...

San Francisco population: 808,437 as of 2020 (Wikipedia)

Palo Alto population: 68,572 as of 2020 (Wikipedia)

Traffic fatalities per capita in San Francisco in 2021: 3.7 / 100,000

Traffic fatalities per capita in Palo Alto in 2020: 5.8 / 100,000

Also, 2020 and 2021 aren't comparable due to the pandemic. Traffic fatalities in the United States increased 10 percent from 2020 to 2021 [0].

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

If you don’t collect statistics, or provide bad service so people don’t bother calling even if you do collect statistics you’ll juice the numbers quite favorably.

For what it’s worth in my area “crime is down,” petty crimes like shoplifting and theft - but violent crimes involving guns are up (brandishing, shootings), but then murder itself is down.

So of course the headline is “crime is down” and when you bring up all the random idiots brandishing weapons in traffic or heroin addicts nodding off by the Starbucks you’re now magically a right wing idiot because of petty word games.

For what it’s worth it doesn’t matter if the metropolitan as a whole is statistically “good,” if my narrow slice is poorly managed it’s poorly managed and no overly broad statistical group changes on the ground lived reality.

You can gaslight people but unfortunately for you a lot of us have years/decades of first hand experience from living in said cities. And some of us have even lived in places that don’t have similar problems to contrast! Whether it’s a “conservative” talking point or not is irrelevant.

Not really? I live in a small city of no note. When I go to the store, nothing of note is locked up behind glass. I never get screamed at or hassled by street people, have to avoid taking a 'bad' street, etc. Nobody here has ever told me to leave my doors unlocked so thieves won't break my windows like that's a normal and OK thing. Nobody has suggested I carry a fake wallet for when I'm robbed. These are real things I've been suggested when visiting a 'real city.'

I guess it's a frame of reference thing, or Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah you can point to FBI stats showing less people are murdering each other, that's a fair point. But to an outsider they don't feel anything resembling safe or normal.

San Francisco is not safe.

Conservatives rarely talk about such things, they're a type of center leftist. I think you meant to say right wingers or, as it's being spelled now across the Internet for reasons I don't understand, rightwingers.

They used a capital C, so could be talking about the tories and not small-c conservativism

Or Google's autocorrect randomly decided to capitalize a word on me. It's gotten really quite terrible

Crime, especially violent crime, has been going down for decades now. SF and LA has the homeless, Portland did a number on itself legalizing all drugs, and NY has a few hundred repeat offenders shoplifting in pharmacies. While unpleasant situations, hardly a hell scape Fox News makes it out to be, considering that the places scoffing at all this actually have higher occurrences of violent crime, gun crime, and mass shootings (the latter of which these cities have none).

this isn’t a blue/red thing, whenever liberals accuse red states of having bad statistics it’s usually unwittingly highlighting a certain demographic in those states they wouldn’t implicate knowingly

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