It was first reported here on Twitter (https://twitter.com/lucy_guo/status/1643451123230031872) -- I'm friends with a bunch of people at MobileCoin where he was working and unfortunately it is true. I only met Bob once but he was a great man.
(Trying to just be sad about his loss and not angry at what San Francisco has become, but it's hard.)
Homicide rates aren’t relevant to a regular person. What matters is the probability of being a victim of a violent crime or a homicide when you weren’t involved in a criminal organization or weren’t already committing a crime.
Many cities with high homicide rates have them specifically because of gang activities and they don’t have any relevance to regular citizens.
Additionally, gun friendly states with “stand your ground” laws will have higher homicide rates just from self defense in robberies.
Tldr; homicide rate is meaningless to how safe you are as a bystander.
“Stand your ground” laws don’t just increase the rate of homicides, they increase the rate of murder. Turns out that thugs are better at killing than civilians
Jake Shields says that it was someone reputable in the tech industry and a close friend of his who was killed. And that the family doesn't want to reveal the name yet.[1][2]
Additionally, if you search through Jake Shield's Twitter feed, you'll find instances where Bob Lee talked to him. [3][4]
Some parts of SoMa, this is true, like 4th Street+.
The area where this man died is known as Rincon Hill and is dominated by tech offices, Sweetgreens, and luxury highrise apartment buildings and is basically dead after 8pm every day of the week. I lived a block away from where this man was stabbed for a month and it felt safe and dead quiet once all the tech workers go home.
The fact that its dead in the evenings is part of the problem. Places like that tend to attract a kind of a crowd later in the evenings precisely because it is nice and quiet otherwise. A friend used to live in that area shortly before Covid and the quiet was too quiet -- sometimes it felt like those scenes from westerns where the whole town shutters up when the big bad gunslingers are having a showdown.
I would be shocked if it were anything but random/senseless (or opportunistic robbery), happening on the street at 0230 in SoMA. This police request for information appears to be related. https://twitter.com/sfvas/status/1643328384234315777
I don't agree with the parent broadly, but note that in America, a political party's numbers don't even need to be in the same universe as "overrunning" to hobble the other party's endeavors.
I don't think this is a point worth making in a city that is so solidly blue that you'd mistake it for the color of the ocean they're going to fall into in 100 years.
If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.
Not really relevant to what I’m saying. You were asking “why aren’t the Democrats being voted out”, I’m saying a question like that demonstrates that you don't understand the situation.
I live in SF. He understands the situation. This city is an insane asylum whose outcomes are driven by a combination of apathy, NIMBY-ism, virtue signaling, and good old fashioned leftist lunacy. The city was airdropped billions of dollars thanks to its becoming a technology hub (through no efforts of its own), and it would probably be better off if the entire industry left, the tax base evaporated, and it had to fend for itself. But then again, at that point it'd just turn into Detroit with nicer weather.
Here's how homicide rates compare in the 11 largest US cities with a Republican mayor and San Francisco (sorted by population):
13.4 Jacksonville, FL
12.6 Fort Worth, TX
6.9 San Francisco, CA
11.9 Oklahoma City, OK
13.0 Fresno, CA
4.9 Mesa, AZ
6.6 Omaha, NE
7.9 Colorado Springs, CO
3.1 Virginia Beach, VI
10.7 Miami, FL
14.3 Tulsa, OK
14.7 Bakersfield, CA
For comparison here are 14 cities with a Democrat mayor from the top 50. I picked these cities by taking the 11 Republican cities and for each picking the next highest and next lowest population Democrat cities:
3.2 San Jose, CA
8.2 Austin, TX
22.4 Columbus, OH
31.8 Washington, DC
4.4 El Paso, TX
17.1 Tucson, AZ
10.9 Sacramento, CA
30.7 Kansas City, MO
32.0 Atlanta, GA
5.5 Raleigh, NC
8.1 Long Beach, CA
30.9 Oakland, CA
22.1 Minneapolis, MN
5.8 Wichita, CA
>> SF has become so unsafe. Why aren't the democrats in charge voted out of office for other people who will do something about it? Do people just not vote in that city?
> If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.
Didn't SF recall its local prosecutor recently over crime issues? It sounds like people may actually be trying (somewhat) to vote the way the GP thinks they should.
I would hazard a guess that the answer to the GP's question is something along the lines that SF residents hate Republicans, but Democrats only come in so many flavors nowadays (and not even all of those are available in the Bay Area).
Maybe recalling Boudin is right or not, but either way when a lot of money is injected into a campaign, it tends to influence outcomes. Just see Prop 22.
Boudin had plenty of donors from around the country (including from billionaires) and was getting free puff pieces placed about him in The New Yorker about his Los Angeles fundraisers. Money flows in all directions.
> By June, the groups seeking to recall Boudin together raised $7.2 million to oust him, while the district attorney’s backers gathered about $3.3 million.
The narrative was against Boudin by the time of the recall, but that campaign was nevertheless still funded by big money, which has a tendency to amplify narratives, and this entire discussion was focused on the recall anyway.
The entire discussion has no focus and starts with a false claim about violent crime being down between 2020 and 2022. In any case, claims that money influenced outcomes are ill-substantiated since many San Francisco election results go against the best-funded outcomes.
Yes, even in that case. In a ranked choice election, you cannot simply look at the numbers in isolation. The opponents to Boudin ran something of a slate where they cross-promoted each other. So in a real sense, Boudin won despite being outspent in 2020. (Though there is a compelling case to make that Boudin's victory was mostly a fluke due to Nancy Tung's Cantonese language voters being misled by local Chinese-only newspapers about policy positions.)
It is not a false claim. Violent crime is more than homicides. Violent crime was down according to SF city police department: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/ You can see more statistics in the discussion here: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...
Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA.
Homicides give a useful corrective since they’re harder to under report.
Given this fact and the various confounders (e.g. how do you rob or assault someone during a time of complete shutdown, how does nilling out the substantial daytime population increase do to per capita rates, is an overdose death really not worth reporting in crime statistics), at best we don’t know what actually happened to violent crime rates in the last three years.
Shoplifting is not a "violent crime". It was everywhere, out in the open, broad daylight. Ride a bike into a store, ride out with a garbage bag full of stuff, set up a table around the corner and sell what you stole at a discount.
SF has a significantly lower charging rate than other major cities, but there's many factors that go into that (the quality of police work, percentage of defendants that live in the district, etc.).
Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA. This narrative that radical leftist district attorneys are responsible for crime is media propaganda completely divorced from the factual realities of crime.
Comparing charging rates of recent San Francisco district attorneys with other cities shows San Francisco has tended to charge way fewer crimes brought to them. Boudin and previous attorneys have blamed this on poor policing, and that SF is unique in that people in surrounding metros travel into SF to commit burglaries. Even so, that has nothing to do with the political leanings of the DA, since cities with much higher charging rates and lower petty crime have Democrat DAs.
You really think 41 versus 49 homicides in a year is the result of which DA is in office? The homicide numbers are not far outside of historical trends, which is downward over the last few decades. https://patch.com/img/cdn20/users/22880695/20191114/014855/s...
The notion that the DA has any outsized impact on crime rates seems baseless to me. I've never seen any evidence which demonstrates a real relationship between district attorneys and overall crime.
I’ve replied to you elsewhere about the issue of using official statistics in the way you are. I’d recommend not making the same point in two places to minimize comment duplication.
I was not making claims here about causal relationships between DAs and crime rates. I was simply engaging with the question about trends of violent crime rates in San Francisco. If pressed, my guess is San Francisco under Boudin saw a slower increase in violent crime than comparable jurisdictions. However, I also think Boudin actually accomplished very little since most meaningful criminal justice reform occurs at the state level. Reasonable models suggest San Francisco incarcerates too little and Modesto too much. That’s why, for example, Prop 25 bail reform would have led to more pretrial detention in San Francisco while reducing the rate for California overall.
I disagree with your assessment of homicide trends. The United States and San Francisco both have seen a trend shift towards increased homicide that would set us back approximately three decades. This is significant.
If a DA in any case has no control over crime rates in the community, then it’s a vibes based job, and Boudin had horrible vibes, as evidenced by his getting recalled.
i've lived in portland, stl, and DC. Just moved to bay area a few weeks ago and never have I in my entire 36 years of living in the US have I felt so unsafe. Not sure if you are blinded by living here for your entire life but this place is really not normal and it is by no means even close to what I would consider remotely safe.
SF is weird and should probably not be considered a city for these kinds of analyses without Oakland and possibly the rest of the bay: the majority of the violence occurs in Oakland.
You can go your entire time in San Francisco without visiting Oakland, and all the cities on the Peninsula or North Bay you're likely to visit instead have much, much lower crime rates. I'm not sure why including Oakland is necessary to make an apples-to-apples comparison to Portland, which OP claims was safer than San Francisco.
Sure and you can live in Chicago without venturing to the south-side, most people who live on the west-side in LA only go to south LA for events and stay out of east LA.
My point is that SF is a bit odd in that it's a county and city that ends very abruptly, and Oakland is a 12 minute car or BART or 25 minute ferry ride from Embarcadero, thus the crime stats in the bay don't make much sense until you start averaging them across the metro area. It's not that Oakland is crazy violent, it's just that the a lot of the most violent areas of the metro fall in its borders, it's not that SF has the most vagrant or larcenous population, it's that it has a good climate for it: lots of the soft targets and toothless police force.
How safe you feel and how safe you are are two different things. San Francisco’s homicide rate, compared to other large American cities, is not high. America is just a batshit violent country.
no because i live in mountain view area now and there's a community of tech enthusiasts/engineer here that makes it valuable for what i'm looking for in life. It comes down to your goals and what you or your family want/need. Everyone will be slightly different so it may not be the best decision for anyone else.
Marginal San Francisco voters are an uninformed bunch. Boudin won his election with the second choice votes of a candidate named Nancy Tung who was on the opposite end of the criminal justice reform spectrum, so much so that the coalition to which Boudin belonged could not even countenance Tung as the mayoral appointment to the police commission.
Winners of San Francisco elections come down to reality of machine politics and not ideological preferences.
SF has a slightly lower murder rate than the US as a whole. Lower than most of the republican states, and lower than Miami, which some people seem to be trying to make the new tech capital.
Murder rate is a proxy for proximity to trauma care. SF does well. The better measure of societal violence is the crime rate. SF is worse than 98% of cities in the US.
Homicide is an interesting metric because death is harder to cover up and thus we should expect it to be reported. There are many other crimes which people just wouldn't bother to report.
It would be overly speculative to argue that Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US, has a spectacular murder rate compared to SF because medical care is so good in SF.
>Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US
Jackson, MS is in Hinds county, which voted 73.4% for Biden in 2020, 71.1% for Clinton in 2016, and 71.5% for Obama in 2012. There hasn't been a single Republican mayor of Jackson in the Post-WW2 period. It's strange to call someone else's comment overly speculative when yours is flat out incorrect.
Which crime? According to this [1] San Francisco is high for larceny-theft (#2), but #66 for murder and non-negligent manslaughter, #67 for rape, #20 for robbery, #66 for aggravated assault, #55 for burglary, #34 for motor vehicle theft, and #23 for arson.
This is out of the 100 most populous of the cities that have data in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports system.
Here are the top 5 in each of these categories.
Murder etc: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Baton Rouge
Rape: New Orleans, Anchorage, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Spokane
Robbery: Baltimore, Cleveland, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis
Aggravate assault: Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee
SF reminds me of college campuses. I went to a liberal college town. Everyone was a bleeding heart liberal who wanted to save the world. They voted Democrat. Even when their homes are trashed or burglarized, having to pickup hypodermic needles from drug users who tossed it on the street so their kid doesn't step on it, or when they are confront with homeless who became violent.... they would still vote Democrat. It's not about the party. It's the fact the policy we have does not work. Homelessness and NIMBY have become the third rail of American politics.
It's because both parties have become extreme and populist. And there is only an illusion of freedom of choice. America needs more than 2 parties for accurate representation.
San Francisco has become a city of one-party rule, which simply does not work. It never will. When a political party's power goes unchecked, it always becomes corrupt, incompetent, or both. This is universal and irrespective of ostensible ideology.
I have yet to see a knife rampage in the US get that bad, correct me if I'm wrong. Let's up it to the Las Vegas shooting 2017 - killing 60 people and wounding at least 413. Also in the US I haven't seen a single person in a car attack that did that much havoc.
If you think air travel hasn't become a much more restrictive process since then you are not keeping up with reality. We can't carry on peanut butter let alone a box cutter. We all get irradiated and scanned. There is a massive no fly list. I remember flying in 1999 and having relatives meet me at the gate which is a laughable idea now.
The utility of airplanes outweighs the utility of civilian firearms designed for assault/defense, or the two are at the very least incomparable. I don't believe that you don't believe this.
Why does it have to be all at the same time in a single rampage? Some killers do it over time. No guns required. Arsonists can kill dozens of people at the same time as well. No guns required. The point is the problem is the person not the tool.
That’s ridiculous. I lived there 2014-2019 and it was delightful. Certainly many bad problems that weren’t getting fixed but ray to day life for most people wasn’t anything like the horror show it’s made out to be.
I didn't enjoy stepping over human feces when walking down the street every day, carefully dodging used needles on the sidewalks or watching homeless people piss or shit in front of Starbucks at ~11AM but to each their own.
I lived there 2015-2019. A year less, but in my experience
5 car break-ins
2 bottles thrown to me
1 mugged, wallet gone
Chased with an axe
These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood. The Tenderloin area definitely experiences worse. Surely everyone that has walked Market St or taken the train has seen things uncommon in most other urban American cities.
I struggle to understand how in SF we've gotten accustomed to downplaying these experiences.
I suspect these people have never actually lived somewhere nice and think junkies threatening you on the street is just normal background noise you have everywhere.
this kind of shit happens everywhere along geary and market stretching all the way past divisadero and to castro. there's a reason the tenderloin is right where geary and market come together. i lived in SF for 2 years around 2008 and it wasn't safe then either.
and more recently i've seen crazy shit go down (or the aftermath, like broken glass everywhere) every time i visit friends. the western more suburban parts of the city are much better.
sf has basically been broken since the gold rush. seems to me the primary goal these days is to make enough money to insulate yourself from this stuff as much as possible, or just leave.
SoMa was a crime-ridden area nearly as bad as the tenderloin and has slowly gotten better, but pretty large parts of it never did. It's really hard to believe you lived in SF and thought SoMa was nice. Inner/Outer Sunset/Richmond are nice. Potrero Hill went from being kind of rough to being nice.
Lots of other areas are nice, but it's honestly very difficult to say SoMa, as a whole, was ever nice.
> These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood.
What? After the Tenderloin, SoMA is absolutely the worst neighborhood for interactions with crazy people. What on Earth gave you the impression that it's "objectively known to be nice"? IMO it's the single worst neighborhood in the city; at least the Tenderloin has history and some great commerce.
You're right, I've lived and worked in both areas (several times during 2000-2016).
SoMA varies a LOT by exact location (at a per-block level) and changes with time of day, time of year, and has changed in cycles over the years. The area where this incident happened was historically one of the safer parts of SoMA, but not the safest, pre-Covid; I don't know how much worse it's gotten but directionally worse.
When I lived in TL (136 Taylor) I had someone brandish a firearm at me, witnessed two murders (in one incident), a bunch of people fighting other people, public drug use, etc., but SoMA is where more people I know personally were assaulted (partially because they're more likely to be walking around there...). I had a few non-consensual interactions which luckily stopped short of escalating too far, and a few times had to abort trips to an office, store, etc. to avoid stuff.
You must carry around your own alternate reality bubble. I was in SF for 6 months in 2015, by all reports a much safer time than now. I lived adjacent to the Berkeley campus and took the Bart to market street.
Got chased into the street twice, and had someone smear their blood on my jacket another time. I watched people eat morsels out of the gutter, defecate in public, scurried away from cars getting broken into and my Bart station was an open air drug market at 8am. I watched drugged out people wander into traffic, just to see other passersbys scream at the police for interfering. I’ve been to the poorest countries in the world and have never seen anything like the Tenderloin.
Very strange title, given that it's not at all verified by the contents of the article. I guess I'll have to flag this one, maybe if it's verified someone can provide a different source for the submission?
Still, though, these comments here are an absolute dumpster fire, and until there is more information, I don't think stories like this produce any sort of insightful/curious discussion, so thanks for flagging.
It was verified in the comments but the only source was a tweet which has since been deleted. I want to assume people are telling the truth but I could see this being one of those "pranks" where we find out what people are willing to believe without proof.
> Joshua Goldbard, the CEO of MobileCoin sent the following statement to ABC7 News: "Bob was a force of nature. Helped to birth Android and CashApp into our world. Moby was his dream: a privacy protecting wallet for the 21st Century. I will miss him every day."
A Hacker-libertarian anti-freedom ideology where drug abuse and homelessness are re-criminalized and mass institutionalization of others against their will.
Just the normal bullshit you get with any political argument (cherry-picking, dishonesty, etc), but particularly exaggerated. The subset of people I'm referring to are not interested in fixing the problem - only in using it as evidence of how justified their hatred for their political enemies is. This is obvious - I'm not referring to something subtle or defending the SF government.
That's nothing more than hiding your head in the sand though, isn't it? When the wry fruits of those policies are so clear to see it is no more than logical that opponents of those policies - who have been clamouring about just those things for years - point out what happened yet another time. This is not cherry-picking at all as there are no cherries to be picked in this garden, only rotten fruits. There is no exaggeration either since there is no need for such - and isn't it a sad thing all in itself?
As to "fixing the problem" I'd say that when your house is on fire you first take to the firehose before you chastise your children for playing with matches.
I'd also ask what is the other side of this. What are the largest conservative cities in the US around 800k scale? It seems like the largest cities in big conservative states, such as TX (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas) or FL (Jacksonville, Miami), are at most as conservative as "purple" or liberal leaning.
SF is also quite close to the national homicide average while being denser than most cities.
Largest is probably Oklahoma City. They average around 70 murders annually for a population of just under 700K, or around 35th in the nation for major cities. It has twice the rate of murder as SF according to that Wiki list posted above.
Only vaguely related to your comment, but comparing cities can give unreliable data.
City boundaries within a metropolitan area are often quite arbitrary. A murder can happen on one block and be in the city and two blocks over and outside the city.
A good example is Detroit. Greater metro Detroit has 4.3M people, but the city of Detroit has 632,000.
And the city of Detroit is where most of the poverty is and most murders happen, within the larger metro area, so you end up with super high murder rates for Detroit and super low murder rates for the surrounding area.
But in the grand scheme of things it’s just one big metro area.
I really like Singapore, but it’s almost a single party police state. It’s somewhat unique in a couple of respects. Mostly that it does actually provide the safety and stability that you are theoretically promised as a trade of for the compromised civil liberties, and that the government is kinda, mostly benevolent… But I don’t think it’s directly comparable to a country that embraces civil liberties. It’s probably pretty safe to walk around Pyongyang too.
Economically speaking they also embrace a basically libertarian style of free market capitalism (in respect to everything except land use), which is another reason they’re not a great comparison.
> I really like Singapore, but it’s almost a single party police state.
SF is a single party city defunding the police. While they parallel Singapore in the single party system they are close to the opposite in nearly all other aspects and it shows. Both places are awash in money but one of them only seems to get worse the more money pours in. If I had to choose between the political system of San Francisco and that of Singapore I would choose the latter.
It is a good thing I do not have to choose though since I don't like either of those systems, it is just that watching the slow-motion train wreck of San Francisco (among others) being run into the ground by self-proclaimed saviours of humanity is so disheartening, especially seen in the light of the claims made by those who push these policies. They must know that they are destroying the place, they can not be so blindsided by ideology. This only leaves the possibility that they are so hell-bent on staying in power that they will do anything it takes, no matter the consequences. How they can rhyme this with their self-proclaimed virtuous goals is beyond me.
The largest cities in big conservative states are where all the Democrats in those states live. And the rural areas in all the big liberal states are where all the Republicans in those states live. Democrats by and large run the cities.
neither "side" wants to address anything even remotely close to the root causes of it, so the options are very limited. The right, at least, favours a solution that is congruent to its reactionary values, in a way it is a more internally consistent ideology than social progressive liberalism. The latter has to content with the unavoidable internal inconsistencies it creates.
In other words, liberals have the uncomfortable task of ruling the richest cities with the largest wealth and income inequality, in such a way that is both progressive and economically liberal. So you end up not regulating the real-estate industry or providing livable wages, but you are also not bulldozing the tent cities or investing in larger prisons to more effectively mass-incarcerate poor people crimes.
Are we talking about the same city? SF real estate is super regulated, it’s my go to example of real estate regulations taken to an insane level. This is the city where any citizen can appeal any project for just a few hundred dollars, and basically every medium-large project is a negotiation with the SF board of supervisors (and often random non profits too, just look at what happened to 469 Stevenson St).
I was more so referring to public housing projects, rent control, banning institutional investment firms and more. I'm sure they have much regulation in place, doesn't mean it meaningfully addresses the housing cost crisis in any capacity.
What's the other side, but portrayed as a straw-man?
Chasing the poor out of the city by sending armed thugs after them, redistributing wealth from poor to rich by ratcheting up rents, keeping rich to poor wealth redistribution to a minimum, and importing more yuppies until gentrification is completed. At some point the poor will be displaced thus reducing wealth inequality in the city thus reducing crime.
I understand that social climbing requires participation in this lying game. Maybe your HN account is tied to your irl identity, so I understand if you can't speak honestly here.
SF in a lot of ways is a microcosm of the US and the broader world which is currently suffering what can only be described as emergent behavior in social networking. Like unintended gradient descent to get everybody maximally polarized by learning what most upsets them and feeding them more of that.
Not even 66th of all US cities, only of the hundred biggest by population. Of all US cities last year it was no worse than 120th per capita and 140th by total[1].
Why are you comparing San Francisco against cities with completely different demographics? If you compare SF against similar cities, it is far more dangerous. It has almost twice the murder rate of NYC for example.
The US, as a whole, ranks #60, at 6.5 intentional homicides per 100k. This is just under Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Paraguay, and Tanzania, and only slightly better than Argentina, Sudan, Tunisia, etc.
By contrast, countries like Germany, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Hungary, etc. rank in the 150-160 range with 0.5 to 0.8 per 100k. Here in Japan, we're #181 with only 0.3/100k.
From my perspective, SF's murder rate is huge, and the entire US is a violent, "developing" nation. (I put "developing" in quotes because it seems like it's actually going backwards, unlike most developing nations, and the use of "3rd world" here doesn't make logical sense according to its original definition.)
I don't know why anyone would live in that city. Unless you're being bussed directly to a campus from out of area, it's an insane place to work, let alone live. Understaffed, under-resourced and under-appreciated.
Not to mention overly expensive. We just bootstrapped a remote first company, hiring people from all over the world, some are in rural areas others are in cities. If we grew to level that we need an engineering HQ, it will be in a European country.
Even then it's not worth it. When I was commuting to and from the city for work there would be 1-2 suicide attempts (or successes) every month and train delays for hours. I don't imagine that got any better after Covid...
"Elites decided they were vulgar, and during the reign of France’s Louis XIV, court chefs banned sugar and spice from all meals except for desserts."
And it was right in HN a while back that someone was poopooing non-European cuisine's use of spices as "a means to cover up subpar ingredients". Turns out that at least in Europe it had nothing to do with subpar ingredients.
I didn't flag it, but if you read the comments here, there is confusion about whether it's even him (apparently the identity was only even mentioned in a now-deleted comment on the article), and there's also the usual amount of posts about SF that are just using the topic as an excuse to express partisan anger. Both are reasonable reasons to flag. If you jump to conspiratorial sarcasm so quickly, that contributes to the problem.
The karma threshold for flags is only 30. High karma users don't have any special voting or flagging power.
Edit: It looks like your account has been using HN primarily, if not exclusively, for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against—it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended going forward, we'd appreciate it.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 373 ms ] thread(Trying to just be sad about his loss and not angry at what San Francisco has become, but it's hard.)
From tweets it appears that he had moved to Miami, came back to SF on a work trip for a day - and this happened.
Many cities with high homicide rates have them specifically because of gang activities and they don’t have any relevance to regular citizens.
Additionally, gun friendly states with “stand your ground” laws will have higher homicide rates just from self defense in robberies.
Tldr; homicide rate is meaningless to how safe you are as a bystander.
There was a notable SF->Miami exodus during COVID, we don't need to attribute reasoning we don't know here.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/mill-valley-man-kille...
Additionally, if you search through Jake Shield's Twitter feed, you'll find instances where Bob Lee talked to him. [3][4]
UPDATE: Jake Shields confirms it was Bob Lee. [5]
[1] https://twitter.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/164344881917319577...
[2] https://twitter.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/164346184739026124...
[3] https://twitter.com/crazybob/status/1538245201734406144?s=20
[4] https://twitter.com/crazybob/status/1587914051715227652?s=20
[5] https://twitter.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/164347000156601548...
My condolences to the family. The guy was too young.
Hope this is a wake up call, but evidence points to the contrary in present day SF
The area where this man died is known as Rincon Hill and is dominated by tech offices, Sweetgreens, and luxury highrise apartment buildings and is basically dead after 8pm every day of the week. I lived a block away from where this man was stabbed for a month and it felt safe and dead quiet once all the tech workers go home.
Now I've heard it all, a city that has been 75%+ leaning heavily in one direction is somehow overrun by right wingers.
> the city is an insane asylum
I guess voters aren’t the only ones acting irrationally then! If I perceived the place I live in to be an insane asylum I’d probably look into moving.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_large...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
> If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.
Didn't SF recall its local prosecutor recently over crime issues? It sounds like people may actually be trying (somewhat) to vote the way the GP thinks they should.
I would hazard a guess that the answer to the GP's question is something along the lines that SF residents hate Republicans, but Democrats only come in so many flavors nowadays (and not even all of those are available in the Bay Area).
So are SF residents propagandized sheeple and recalled him for no good reason, or is there more to the story than your first sentence?
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/garry-tan-vs-chesa-b...
https://twitter.com/jackiefielder_/status/164165611708338176...
Maybe recalling Boudin is right or not, but either way when a lot of money is injected into a campaign, it tends to influence outcomes. Just see Prop 22.
> By June, the groups seeking to recall Boudin together raised $7.2 million to oust him, while the district attorney’s backers gathered about $3.3 million.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/Chesa-Boudin-ou...
https://ballotpedia.org/District_Attorney_election_in_San_Fr...
https://ballotpedia.org/Chesa_Boudin_recall,_San_Francisco,_...
Homicides give a useful corrective since they’re harder to under report.
Given this fact and the various confounders (e.g. how do you rob or assault someone during a time of complete shutdown, how does nilling out the substantial daytime population increase do to per capita rates, is an overdose death really not worth reporting in crime statistics), at best we don’t know what actually happened to violent crime rates in the last three years.
Boudin refused to prosecute any of this.
SF has a significantly lower charging rate than other major cities, but there's many factors that go into that (the quality of police work, percentage of defendants that live in the district, etc.).
Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA. This narrative that radical leftist district attorneys are responsible for crime is media propaganda completely divorced from the factual realities of crime.
Comparing charging rates of recent San Francisco district attorneys with other cities shows San Francisco has tended to charge way fewer crimes brought to them. Boudin and previous attorneys have blamed this on poor policing, and that SF is unique in that people in surrounding metros travel into SF to commit burglaries. Even so, that has nothing to do with the political leanings of the DA, since cities with much higher charging rates and lower petty crime have Democrat DAs.
You really think 41 versus 49 homicides in a year is the result of which DA is in office? The homicide numbers are not far outside of historical trends, which is downward over the last few decades. https://patch.com/img/cdn20/users/22880695/20191114/014855/s...
The notion that the DA has any outsized impact on crime rates seems baseless to me. I've never seen any evidence which demonstrates a real relationship between district attorneys and overall crime.
I was not making claims here about causal relationships between DAs and crime rates. I was simply engaging with the question about trends of violent crime rates in San Francisco. If pressed, my guess is San Francisco under Boudin saw a slower increase in violent crime than comparable jurisdictions. However, I also think Boudin actually accomplished very little since most meaningful criminal justice reform occurs at the state level. Reasonable models suggest San Francisco incarcerates too little and Modesto too much. That’s why, for example, Prop 25 bail reform would have led to more pretrial detention in San Francisco while reducing the rate for California overall.
I disagree with your assessment of homicide trends. The United States and San Francisco both have seen a trend shift towards increased homicide that would set us back approximately three decades. This is significant.
If a DA in any case has no control over crime rates in the community, then it’s a vibes based job, and Boudin had horrible vibes, as evidenced by his getting recalled.
Let alone pick up the phone - which happened in my case twice in a year
My point is that SF is a bit odd in that it's a county and city that ends very abruptly, and Oakland is a 12 minute car or BART or 25 minute ferry ride from Embarcadero, thus the crime stats in the bay don't make much sense until you start averaging them across the metro area. It's not that Oakland is crazy violent, it's just that the a lot of the most violent areas of the metro fall in its borders, it's not that SF has the most vagrant or larcenous population, it's that it has a good climate for it: lots of the soft targets and toothless police force.
Winners of San Francisco elections come down to reality of machine politics and not ideological preferences.
It would be overly speculative to argue that Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US, has a spectacular murder rate compared to SF because medical care is so good in SF.
Jackson, MS is in Hinds county, which voted 73.4% for Biden in 2020, 71.1% for Clinton in 2016, and 71.5% for Obama in 2012. There hasn't been a single Republican mayor of Jackson in the Post-WW2 period. It's strange to call someone else's comment overly speculative when yours is flat out incorrect.
This is out of the 100 most populous of the cities that have data in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports system.
Here are the top 5 in each of these categories.
Murder etc: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Baton Rouge
Rape: New Orleans, Anchorage, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Spokane
Robbery: Baltimore, Cleveland, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis
Aggravate assault: Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee
Burglary: Cleveland, Memphis, Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Baltimore
Larceny-theft: Spokane, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Memphis, St. Louis
Motor vehicle theft: Albuquerque, Oakland, Detroit, Portland OR, San Bernardino
Arson: Detroit, Buffalo, Baton Rouge, Bakersfield, Stockton
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
I interviewed around 2017 in SF and it was so bad I didn't dare walk back to the station (caught an Uber instead). It's a terrible place.
I avoid them because there’s much elsewhere. It’s not that I’m explicitly avoiding, but my interests are often in other parts of the city.
5 car break-ins 2 bottles thrown to me 1 mugged, wallet gone Chased with an axe
These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood. The Tenderloin area definitely experiences worse. Surely everyone that has walked Market St or taken the train has seen things uncommon in most other urban American cities.
I struggle to understand how in SF we've gotten accustomed to downplaying these experiences.
and more recently i've seen crazy shit go down (or the aftermath, like broken glass everywhere) every time i visit friends. the western more suburban parts of the city are much better.
sf has basically been broken since the gold rush. seems to me the primary goal these days is to make enough money to insulate yourself from this stuff as much as possible, or just leave.
i'm having a really hard time reconciling 4 years in sf with thinking soma is one of the nicer parts of the city.
Lots of other areas are nice, but it's honestly very difficult to say SoMa, as a whole, was ever nice.
And to be clear, I usually find the "these cities are shitholes" rhetoric overblown. But SoMa has been, and will likely continue to be, shit.
What? After the Tenderloin, SoMA is absolutely the worst neighborhood for interactions with crazy people. What on Earth gave you the impression that it's "objectively known to be nice"? IMO it's the single worst neighborhood in the city; at least the Tenderloin has history and some great commerce.
SoMA varies a LOT by exact location (at a per-block level) and changes with time of day, time of year, and has changed in cycles over the years. The area where this incident happened was historically one of the safer parts of SoMA, but not the safest, pre-Covid; I don't know how much worse it's gotten but directionally worse.
When I lived in TL (136 Taylor) I had someone brandish a firearm at me, witnessed two murders (in one incident), a bunch of people fighting other people, public drug use, etc., but SoMA is where more people I know personally were assaulted (partially because they're more likely to be walking around there...). I had a few non-consensual interactions which luckily stopped short of escalating too far, and a few times had to abort trips to an office, store, etc. to avoid stuff.
TL at least had better food.
Got chased into the street twice, and had someone smear their blood on my jacket another time. I watched people eat morsels out of the gutter, defecate in public, scurried away from cars getting broken into and my Bart station was an open air drug market at 8am. I watched drugged out people wander into traffic, just to see other passersbys scream at the police for interfering. I’ve been to the poorest countries in the world and have never seen anything like the Tenderloin.
Ya’ll can keep SF.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: looks legit based on other new comments.
Still, though, these comments here are an absolute dumpster fire, and until there is more information, I don't think stories like this produce any sort of insightful/curious discussion, so thanks for flagging.
> Joshua Goldbard, the CEO of MobileCoin sent the following statement to ABC7 News: "Bob was a force of nature. Helped to birth Android and CashApp into our world. Moby was his dream: a privacy protecting wallet for the 21st Century. I will miss him every day."
The shameless plug for "Moby" does bother me.
Sad day for the community.
Rule by common sense, not ideology.
As to "fixing the problem" I'd say that when your house is on fire you first take to the firehose before you chastise your children for playing with matches.
SF is also quite close to the national homicide average while being denser than most cities.
City boundaries within a metropolitan area are often quite arbitrary. A murder can happen on one block and be in the city and two blocks over and outside the city.
A good example is Detroit. Greater metro Detroit has 4.3M people, but the city of Detroit has 632,000.
And the city of Detroit is where most of the poverty is and most murders happen, within the larger metro area, so you end up with super high murder rates for Detroit and super low murder rates for the surrounding area.
But in the grand scheme of things it’s just one big metro area.
Economically speaking they also embrace a basically libertarian style of free market capitalism (in respect to everything except land use), which is another reason they’re not a great comparison.
SF is a single party city defunding the police. While they parallel Singapore in the single party system they are close to the opposite in nearly all other aspects and it shows. Both places are awash in money but one of them only seems to get worse the more money pours in. If I had to choose between the political system of San Francisco and that of Singapore I would choose the latter.
It is a good thing I do not have to choose though since I don't like either of those systems, it is just that watching the slow-motion train wreck of San Francisco (among others) being run into the ground by self-proclaimed saviours of humanity is so disheartening, especially seen in the light of the claims made by those who push these policies. They must know that they are destroying the place, they can not be so blindsided by ideology. This only leaves the possibility that they are so hell-bent on staying in power that they will do anything it takes, no matter the consequences. How they can rhyme this with their self-proclaimed virtuous goals is beyond me.
The largest cities in big conservative states are where all the Democrats in those states live. And the rural areas in all the big liberal states are where all the Republicans in those states live. Democrats by and large run the cities.
In other words, liberals have the uncomfortable task of ruling the richest cities with the largest wealth and income inequality, in such a way that is both progressive and economically liberal. So you end up not regulating the real-estate industry or providing livable wages, but you are also not bulldozing the tent cities or investing in larger prisons to more effectively mass-incarcerate poor people crimes.
Are we talking about the same city? SF real estate is super regulated, it’s my go to example of real estate regulations taken to an insane level. This is the city where any citizen can appeal any project for just a few hundred dollars, and basically every medium-large project is a negotiation with the SF board of supervisors (and often random non profits too, just look at what happened to 469 Stevenson St).
Chasing the poor out of the city by sending armed thugs after them, redistributing wealth from poor to rich by ratcheting up rents, keeping rich to poor wealth redistribution to a minimum, and importing more yuppies until gentrification is completed. At some point the poor will be displaced thus reducing wealth inequality in the city thus reducing crime.
Stop criminalizing poverty and try actually solving the problem.
Or 18 on this list: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
Here's another link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
The US, as a whole, ranks #60, at 6.5 intentional homicides per 100k. This is just under Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Paraguay, and Tanzania, and only slightly better than Argentina, Sudan, Tunisia, etc.
By contrast, countries like Germany, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Hungary, etc. rank in the 150-160 range with 0.5 to 0.8 per 100k. Here in Japan, we're #181 with only 0.3/100k.
From my perspective, SF's murder rate is huge, and the entire US is a violent, "developing" nation. (I put "developing" in quotes because it seems like it's actually going backwards, unlike most developing nations, and the use of "3rd world" here doesn't make logical sense according to its original definition.)
That’s the definition also of a civilized society, how you deal with homelessness and drug addicts.
SF is clearly not a civilized place at all, or frankly the USA for that matter.
usually only the lower classes suffer for our luxury beliefs. this is an exception.
"Elites decided they were vulgar, and during the reign of France’s Louis XIV, court chefs banned sugar and spice from all meals except for desserts."
And it was right in HN a while back that someone was poopooing non-European cuisine's use of spices as "a means to cover up subpar ingredients". Turns out that at least in Europe it had nothing to do with subpar ingredients.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/fatal-stabbing-bob...
Edit: It looks like your account has been using HN primarily, if not exclusively, for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against—it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended going forward, we'd appreciate it.