I'm not sure why this argument is persuasive. It would be like saying Palestine, OH is still safe because the risk of cancer per square mile is very good. If anything, we might naively expect that density itself causes homicide since proximity means opportunity. But on homicide incidence, SF (6.35)¹ tracks closely to the national average (7.8)².
Another argument posed in the article is that decriminalization is screwing with record keeping. But for homicides? Homicide is the most difficult to obscure.
if the crime stats showed the same rate per sq mile for two cities, one with a population of 1M and the other 100k, would you want to go to the 100K city or the 1M city?
Would you say St Louis is a safer city because it looks very clean and classy, well loved by tourists, and also has sparser homicides? Similarly, would you say that Palestine OH is a safer city on biological risks by arguments of geographic sparsity?
As a foreign observer, what are the locals thoughts on all this?
I assumed it was scaremongering after seeing comments saying that theft was legal in SF up until the $300 point (the number might be incorrect, can't remember exactly) but then saw some articles popping up saying lots of big franchises like CVS were shutting their stores due to rampant theft. But from where I sit (in Australia) it seems so bizarre to allow theft like this I struggle to believe it is real.
Can anyone on the ground confirm?
As a bit of contact I spent 1 year in Texas and loved it (and loved seeing all th sights and other states too) but no way would theft like that be tolerated there.
Why are locals so tolerant of this type of crime? I can't imagine they like crime more than people anywhere else so why aren't they protesting or something?
FWIW in 8 years of living in SF, I've reported three theft-related crimes. The two below $300 never got any response (from my perspective!) and the one above $300 (eventually) resulted in the return of the relevant property. Mo idea how exact or how essential the dollar value is... But it seemed to matter?
I lived in SF for 8 years. SOMA. I was assaulted twice and mugged twice. I left because I was fearful for my life. And now my friend Bob is dead, exactly like how I thought I'd end up.
I am sorry that you have lost your friend. It's been a few years, but I believe he was the guy presenting via teleconference as various groups he had a hand in, like Third Degree Glass, were trying to keep Makers in St. Louis going after TechShop's stumble. I remember thinking that was pretty neat of him -- a lot of people who leave the Midwest just don't look back at all.
It’s a bit true, and a bit misleading. Everything is down to perception and visibility.
Theft is absolutely not “legal” but it is true that police don’t investigate everything equally. Someone stealing shampoo from a store isn’t worth the cost of a police investigation, for example. More concretely, there was a recent policy from an old politician to essentially not focus on prosecuting “crimes of desperation” if they didn’t have a big impact (eg under $300). There’s some side affects to that, like increase in petty thefts, or the perception that they’re not being stopped.
I think there’s some unique issues like package theft that are probably pretty bad and probably structurally hard to solve. SF has a lot of townhomes and residential buildings that have a door on the street so stealing packages is probably easier than in suburbs or denser cities that have big building with mail rooms.
In SF, the homeless population is very concentrated (in soma, TL), and it makes many people feel unsafe. Statistics show it’s not particularly dangerous city at large, nor are you likely to be a victim, but that is cold comfort for someone walking alone at night, especially in these areas. I personally understand that sentiment and there are places I feel uncomfortable being, which is a pity. It sucks that someone well known and connected was killed, but it’s not really common and no one I know is particularly scared when outside on the street day to day.
I also think there’s a large cohort of people in SF for a job, but not because they like the city. I think that leads to being easily disenchanted and grumpy with the city. Especially when those people disproportionately move to the above mentioned sketchy areas (eg soma).
Also SF is literally known for being tolerant for generations. At one time, the hippies were just a local drug using homeless population here.
The police may be understaffed but it's not budget issues or anything - it's because they've made their job unattractive by letting the bad apples spoil their reputation. The entire staff of 59 (about that number) traffic enforcement officers was found to give out on average only 10 tickets a day. That's not each, that as an entire department in a city with rampant traffic violations at all hours. The SF pd has been caught on camera watching places get robbed and not moving in until the thieves already leave. Two of their officers are currently being prosecuted over destroying evidence that they supposedly destroyed because cataloging it would take too much work.
You get the picture, the SF PD bad apples have really made the police force dysfunctional and unable to hire.
The police were wildly successful at shifting the blame to the prior DA, but the DA wasn't the problem. That DA is gone and nothing changed.
I lived in SF from 2010-2016 and worked there (while living in the east bay) until 2020. In that time I had a bicycle stolen, two motorcycles stolen, and a half—dozen occasions where insane homeless people tried to bludgeon or stab me. The homeless problem got worse every year. I often witnessed theft in stores. The first time I saw someone stealing, I told a security guard. He thanked me and then did nothing. The thief walked out with a bunch of candy and booze. Another time I confronted a thief. He became extremely aggressive towards me and said he’d be waiting outside to jump me. He zipped up his backpack full of stolen goods and walked out, but I didn’t see him when I left.
The videos you’ve seen are probably cherry picked for maximum outrage, but less egregious behavior is common. If you commute via public transportation, you will have to deal with crazy smelly drug addicts on a weekly basis. If you leave your bicycle locked up outside, there’s a good chance it will be stolen or vandalized.
I’m so glad I moved. I only regret not doing it sooner.
Part of living in SF it witnessing crime on a daily basis and frequently being a victim. It's no way to live and it's unlike any other city in the US (or anywhere else I've been in the world).
I don't need to cite statistics to know how dangerous SF is. I've lived there an experienced it. I've also been to Atlanta, Chicago, and Houston and felt much safer.
First step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one and San Francisco even refused to do that.
The stats woefully underestimate actual crime rates because people have stopped reporting much of it. I only reported the vehicle thefts and one of the assaults. The police are so useless that it’s more of an inconvenience to wait around for them than it is to just go on about your day. They’ll just take a report and never catch the crook.
> I assumed it was scaremongering after seeing comments saying that theft was legal in SF up until the $300 point (the number might be incorrect, can't remember exactly) but then saw some articles popping up saying lots of big franchises like CVS were shutting their stores due to rampant theft. But from where I sit (in Australia) it seems so bizarre to allow theft like this I struggle to believe it is real.
You're talking about Prop 47, and the number is $950. There's some pretty widespread misconceptions about Prop 47, first of which is that theft under that amount is not "legal" - it's just a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
But I think something much more important to recognize is that this law is hardly a uniquely Californian affair. Texas, of all places, has an equivalent law, except its limit is $2500 - higher than California's: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-pun...
That said, SF does undeniably still have one of the highest larceny theft rates in the future, and it has plenty of work to do on that front. But you'd be right to be skeptical of anecdotal evidence that the city is outright dysfunctional. At the very least, you shouldn't believe anyone who states SF's problems are the fault of any single simple cause, whether that be Prop 47 or Chesa Boudin.
> You're talking about Prop 47, and the number is $950. There's some pretty widespread misconceptions about Prop 47, first of which is that theft under that amount is not "legal" - it's just a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
> But I think something much more important to recognize is that this law is hardly a uniquely Californian affair. Texas, of all places, has an equivalent law, except its limit is $2500 - higher than California's: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-pun...
Unlike in Texas, misdemeanors aren't taken seriously at all in California (i.e., the charges are usually dropped), to the point that things that don't reach the bar of being a felony are de facto legal.
In Texas, our Attorney General is currently under indictment for felonies[0] (and has been for going on a decade; I suppose he's good at legal delays), so I don't get the impression that felonies are taken particularly seriously either.
What SF retailers should do is add $1000 to all price tags (online/advertised prices can stay the same) and discount every item by an extra $1000 on checkout.
This way any theft/shoplifting that skips checkout is an automatic felony.
If the city want's to f##k you with b#llsh#t number juggling, you do the same to them.
Doesn't matter what statistics say - there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, as they say. I know with my own eyes that SF is dangerous. There is a criminal element intermixed with your daily life, forcing you to be on guard in most outdoor interactions.
This might be my bias, I should be OK with drug addicts strung out on the sidewalk, I'm just privileged, blah blah. Don't care. ~6 years ago we went out to get lunch with a company I was visiting, and a guy came onto the patio and just screamed at the top of his lungs for several minutes before walking away. Everyone there just considered it normal, the servers kept serving, everyone just stared at their plates or phones as this screaming banshee went "AHHHH AHHH AHHHH [breathe] AHH AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHH" among everyone eating. Absurd. How do you live like this?
My uncle has schizophrenia and were he not housed in a a mobile home paid for by my father, would probably be up to something like the guy you encountered.
But I suppose the question is what legal remedy is there for someone yelling at you? What would you like to have happened to this guy?
The programmer in me is reminded of those bugs that never ever get fixed, year after year, because everybody shoots down anyone’s proposal, until finally someone comes in and just takes care of it, by ignoring all the hand-wringers.
Doesn't that still give a legal remedy? Police just need to watch him until he takes his next hit and then arrest him once he gets the drugs out of wherever he was hiding them.
You have the seed of an excellent fiction story here!
Let's invent a job that's not even law enforcement, where the duties are to accept assignment to monitor another citizen for arbitrary rulebreaking until they do so, at which point this employee records the offense with their perpetually-recording device (which we can imagine to be thermo-electrically powered so as to not even need one of those annoying off switches modern LE are so fond of actuating).
Hire criteria will have to be at least a masters degree in order to absorb the excess baristas in the labor market, and our main character can start off nonplussed by the job but at least it pays better than selling tech bros and babes steamed "milk" with various additives (aside: is there an appropriately gender-neutral infantilizing term for the non-cis?), and Hiro Protagonist needs to pay down their educational debt.
Over the course of the story we can enjoy the waffling between "this is a very important job", "i really need to make my student loan payment for once this quarter", and "holy doodle I'm really doing Satan/Capital's own work out here" as the character: builds personal relationships with the monitored classes (let's throw annoying children in to prod a proper diversity of pearl clutchers!); observes the necessity of pruning their own habitats of undesirables; and grows familiar with the Karens who file monitoring requests (and their variously un/reasonable monitoring requests).
We can even throw a crumb to the SV satire tropes and structure their employer as a Citizen-alike "private policing" disruptor -- this will be an excellent JPod-style send-up of the gig economy.
For bonus points, really play up the internal torture this main character endures as their finger hovers over the "request monitoring" button for the variously ill in their own neighborhood. I think they should start off entirely repulsed by the notion of calling the cops on their fellow franchisee, but eventually get beaten into cognitive submission to the new model.
This is gold, josephcsible! If only we could get it through the reams of LLM pap clogging the traditional sci-fi outlets.
I couldn't actually sketch the twist and denounment, that'd be actually...writing.
Last time I was in SF was probably 10 years ago for WWDC (back in the days when you actually could sign up for it!) I'd been going every year for a few years. We made the mistake (just ONCE) of sitting outside at a restaurant on the patio, it was a beautiful, warm June evening (amazingly the fog stayed away). Crazy guy came onto the patio and started screaming and harassing people, everyone (incl. the staff) just seemed to just ignore it. Never sat outside again.
TFA is right in that in other cities the crime is mostly gang related vs SF where the victims are mostly ordinary people going about their business.
Back then SF was a total shit hole (literally), I can't imagine what it's like now.
For better or worse, this exists in most cities. It’s absolutely not unique to any one city. Not saying this is a good thing or something we shouldn’t try to fix.
Also this guy wasn’t dangerous. You can see it with your own eyes but this guy is inconvenient and annoying but not dangerous.
I cannot possibly disagree more, living in a top 20 American city and being someone who generally only exists in cities (I hate bugs). This is 100% an SF thing, and if you disagree I think you need to travel more.
I bet you are from SF or Seattle where the whole “this exists in all cities” is used as justification.
I’ve been to most big cities in the US and it’s not the case. I feel fairly safe to walk outside at 2 AM in New York. In contrast every time I go to SF I’m either personally harassed by a random homeless person or witnessing someone else being harassed. I wouldn’t even go outside that late.
You said you live in NYC (edit: nevermind). There’s a huge difference between neighborhoods in NYC, and the same is true in SF. I’ve seen this behavior in NYC (and Boston and LA and cleveland, and yes Seattle too).
SF only allows hotels in one corner of the city, and that’s very close to a bad areas. Most of SF is safe to walk at 2am, and i do it daily when i walk my dog. Tourists disproportionately see the worst of the city. We should be trying to make it better everywhere, but tourists really get the worst view of it.
I’m very sorry you had a bad experience on your trips, the city has a lot more to offer, and I hope you’ll be able to experience a different side of it one day.
No, I do not live in NY. Just gave it as a reference, many of other cities are considered as not “real cities” by SF folks. I lived in Bay Area and visited SF frequently. And I spent quite a bit of time in NY. Obviously there’re homeless in NY, but most folks are fairly humble and you know what to expect.
And I myself from a third world country, so the bar of safe city is not that high.
I say all of this not because of Fox News, or because I never saw another big city, or any other excuse. But because I believe SF is a beautiful city that needs to get their act together.
It’s a Stockholm Syndrome situation where people have lived so long with terrible circumstances that they have rationalized it. “It’s not that bad, every city is like this, statistically it’s actually OK, you just don’t know how cities are, blah blah blah.”
I don’t know why I even care. I live in an amazing, safe, large city where I raise children and the police arrest criminals. Whatever, enjoy living in a combat zone.
Someone who lives in NY, it depends where you are. Walking outside Battery Park @ 2 AM? Yeah of course your safe. Try going uptown @ 2 AM. Try being a woman going uptown @ 2 AM.
NY does the exact same thing to socially disruptive people that the folks describe in the story: ignore them. In fact I’m pretty sure we do it better than any other city.
But in the moment you don’t know that. What you do know is this person is obviously not acting in an appropriate manner consistent with the expected societal norms for pretty much everywhere in the world except SF. That means they may be more capable of other behaviors outside the norm and that makes them dangerous. That’s enough for most people to be put into a defensive mode in that kind of encounter—causing people to feel unsafe during an encounter that may ultimately just turn out to be annoying and inconvenient.
Not to the same extent as SF, it's a disaster, I have quite literally been to cities in third world countries that are better. If I had to choose between London and a place that's half as bad as SF I'd still choose London.
Let me start by saying that, as a San Francisco resident of almost 20 years, I agree with the central thesis of the post: San Francisco is a something hole that I'd leave in a heartbeat if the decision was solely mine. But I don't think this is the post to defend that position.
It seems to be driven principally by emotion, chooses odd stats to make it's points, and when it talks about decriminalization of "things" it doesn't get any more specific than I just did.
I get that the author is angry; understandably so. I think there is a coherent argument to be made supporting the author's assertions. I just don't think this author in this post has actually advanced their own point. I do think that it is critical for a serious, as opposed to emotional, response to what the author is seeing to be made. Otherwise worse for San Francisco is on the way.
When I see CNN saying San Francisco isn't that dangerous and comparing it to Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago, the thing that immediately comes to mind is how much more dense that crime is in San Francisco and how much that affects the safety of, say, walking around the city.
So, while these may be somewhat emotional arguments, San Francisco has a serious problem that I see it doing nothing to address, which is why I left in 2018, and many people continue to just deny it has any problem at all, hiding behind these "stats" among other things.
The first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one and San Francisco won't even do that.
> the thing that immediately comes to mind is how much more dense that crime is in San Francisco
I saw this same idea in the San Francisco subreddit today, and it's the first time I've ever heard of expressing crime per square mile as any kind of statistic. It seems like reaching for some way in which San Francisco is extraordinary when it's realized that the per capita crime numbers aren't particularly out of line with any other major US city.
But other cities have crime too. I live in south Texas, and anecdotally my house was broken into twice in 2021, my parent's neighbors' house was left vacant and was subsequently ransacked and had a vehicle stolen as well. Just this week their electrician's shop was burgled and only a strong gate prevented the thieves from getting away with his truck, but they still stole $20K in tools and wire. A few years ago one of my co-workers was shot to death by his wife.
It's clear that San Francisco has some idiosyncrasies of its own, but I think the US is just a particularly dangerous country in the developed world.
I've lived in many other parts of the US (Nashville, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles) and nowhere have I come anywhere close to experiencing the crime of San Francisco. It's not even remotely comparable.
Here in St. Louis we have a District Attorney who ran on an activist platform of some kind who, like the San Francisco DA who was eventually recalled, just didn't prosecute. Over and over. Car thefts, sex crimes, whatever. Murder charges get re-filed and re-filed. Grumble grumble grumble.
The flashpoint was a recent event in which one of the guys whom she ought have to have sent to jail a long time back (violated probation boundaries over ninety times according to his ankle monitor, among other things), got pretty excited to drive and some teenage girl from a visiting volleyball league is now minus her legs, because this guy wasn't much of a driver. Bang! And grumble grumble grumble is now a lot of noise.
I suspect this is similar. We'll probably find someone with an awful lot of priors, maybe a violated parole, did the stabbing, and then folks will say, "Well, if this guy was in the slam like he belongs, this wouldn't have happened." Bob Lee may serve as the unfortunate face of some unpleasant statistics.
bulglaries ... prosecutors had filed charges in about 66% of the cases and filed motions to revoke probation in about 82% of cases.
prosecuted 35 of 61 (57%) sexual assault cases requested for prosecution by police.
what you point out is the real tragedy. due to the brutal level of overall crime the small ones slip through the system. which results in criminals going free for a long time. the level of deterrence is very low.
on top of all this the prison system makes things worse, but there's currently no alternative. it's a multifaceted systemic problem (underfunded overly-brutal and excessively inefficient police department, politicized prosecution, underfunded public defender system, and the cherry on top is the lack of reintegration for convicts; the probation system is unnecessarily cruel and also inefficient)
I'm pretty sure this guy has completely mixed up cities and metro areas. The City of Atlanta is about 60% smaller than the city of San Francisco. This guy is almost cetainly referring to the Atlanta Metropolitan Area being bigger than the City of San Francisco, which is true, but now you're comparing two different things and almost certainly using the city of Atlanta crime statistics.
There's actually no real sources cited, and no actual statistics cited so this blog post is garbage. I'm sorry his friend died in a horrible way, but it should not lead to knee-jerk emotion-based reactions that are not based in reality
The crime rate in SF does seem high, but I have a few issues here:
> When you do the math, the incidents of all types per square mile in San Francisco is by far and away the highest in the country with zero comparison
Well yes, because crime rates are a product of population not land area. It should not be surprising that SF with a population of 874k in 49 square miles has more crime per square mile than, say Charlotte 873k in 309 square miles.
I am not saying crime is low in SF, I'm saying "I don't like this relevant comparison so I will use this other one" isn't super helpful.
> If San Francisco were as large as Atlanta, Chicago, etc. its stats would reveal a completely different story.
Yes, because the population if it were the size of Atlanta it would have 2.4 million people, e.g. almost five times the population.
> Most of the victims are innocent civilians. Just watch the news
What are the actual statistics here - I could believe this claim, but citing the news isn't relevant because its biased in favor of reporting crime against civilians (man bites dog vs dog bites man).
> Lastly, San Francisco has decriminalized so many things that used to be crimes that now, magically, they no longer show up in the statistics
I agree with this statement. The crime rates in the Castro would be much higher if we hadn't decriminalized homosexuality. Crime rates in the mission would be much higher if weed remained illegal. Of course, you'd also gets spikes in crime rates if you made it illegal to have unoccupied residential property, or made labor code violations criminal rather than civil code violations.
I get that this guy's friend has been murdered but to pretend the issue is that crimes statistics lie isn't going to stop it happening. It seems much more likely to me that the core issue is that the typical divide in US cities between affluent areas and poor areas does not exist in SF, and by proxy the gap between high and low crime regions doesn't exist. I'm sure plenty of people in plenty of cities have areas they don't walk through but SF makes that impossible.
Why does crime per square mile matter? Per capita is the only metric that matters. You can't commit homicide against a plot of land.
Of course Houston has low crime per square mile, it's automobile sprawl hell. Walking across a dang parking lot takes 5 minutes.
> Second, most crime in these other cities is gang on gang. In San Francisco, that's not the case. Most of the victims are innocent civilians. Just watch the news.
Big, fat, stinking, CITATION NEEDED. Just watch the news...really?? That's your source, local news crime scare television?
San Francisco ranks 66th out of 100, with the rank of 1 being worst. In other words, it's below average in terms of crime.
More homicidal cities include Phoenix, Denver, and many other cities that are generally considered to be safe places to be.
Author: I understand your friend just died and that's really rough but that's not an excuse to throw objectivity out of the window. I see you’re an expert in startups, business, and engineering, and while you’re probably really smart it might be wise to accept that you might not be an expert in this area.
First, I’m sorry for the author and Bob Lee himself for what happened. I hope his family gets some closure and the people responsible are put to punishment. No doubt SF is dangerous, but this article is crap. I don’t really see ‘crime pressure’ as a legitimate statistic (crime per square meter). I think it’s normal to talk ‘per capita’ instead. And the evidence for most crime being committed against civilians is: “just watch the news”. Sorry, but that’s not evidence. The news shows cherry-picked ultraviolence to make us feel scared or angry.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAnother argument posed in the article is that decriminalization is screwing with record keeping. But for homicides? Homicide is the most difficult to obscure.
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
I assumed it was scaremongering after seeing comments saying that theft was legal in SF up until the $300 point (the number might be incorrect, can't remember exactly) but then saw some articles popping up saying lots of big franchises like CVS were shutting their stores due to rampant theft. But from where I sit (in Australia) it seems so bizarre to allow theft like this I struggle to believe it is real.
Can anyone on the ground confirm?
As a bit of contact I spent 1 year in Texas and loved it (and loved seeing all th sights and other states too) but no way would theft like that be tolerated there.
Why are locals so tolerant of this type of crime? I can't imagine they like crime more than people anywhere else so why aren't they protesting or something?
Make of that what you will.
eg. Carjacker gets apprehended in neighboring county, wildly different outcome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U_PAWJNrG8
Theft is absolutely not “legal” but it is true that police don’t investigate everything equally. Someone stealing shampoo from a store isn’t worth the cost of a police investigation, for example. More concretely, there was a recent policy from an old politician to essentially not focus on prosecuting “crimes of desperation” if they didn’t have a big impact (eg under $300). There’s some side affects to that, like increase in petty thefts, or the perception that they’re not being stopped.
I think there’s some unique issues like package theft that are probably pretty bad and probably structurally hard to solve. SF has a lot of townhomes and residential buildings that have a door on the street so stealing packages is probably easier than in suburbs or denser cities that have big building with mail rooms.
In SF, the homeless population is very concentrated (in soma, TL), and it makes many people feel unsafe. Statistics show it’s not particularly dangerous city at large, nor are you likely to be a victim, but that is cold comfort for someone walking alone at night, especially in these areas. I personally understand that sentiment and there are places I feel uncomfortable being, which is a pity. It sucks that someone well known and connected was killed, but it’s not really common and no one I know is particularly scared when outside on the street day to day.
I also think there’s a large cohort of people in SF for a job, but not because they like the city. I think that leads to being easily disenchanted and grumpy with the city. Especially when those people disproportionately move to the above mentioned sketchy areas (eg soma).
Also SF is literally known for being tolerant for generations. At one time, the hippies were just a local drug using homeless population here.
But the locals are pissed.
The police may be understaffed but it's not budget issues or anything - it's because they've made their job unattractive by letting the bad apples spoil their reputation. The entire staff of 59 (about that number) traffic enforcement officers was found to give out on average only 10 tickets a day. That's not each, that as an entire department in a city with rampant traffic violations at all hours. The SF pd has been caught on camera watching places get robbed and not moving in until the thieves already leave. Two of their officers are currently being prosecuted over destroying evidence that they supposedly destroyed because cataloging it would take too much work.
You get the picture, the SF PD bad apples have really made the police force dysfunctional and unable to hire.
The police were wildly successful at shifting the blame to the prior DA, but the DA wasn't the problem. That DA is gone and nothing changed.
The videos you’ve seen are probably cherry picked for maximum outrage, but less egregious behavior is common. If you commute via public transportation, you will have to deal with crazy smelly drug addicts on a weekly basis. If you leave your bicycle locked up outside, there’s a good chance it will be stolen or vandalized.
I’m so glad I moved. I only regret not doing it sooner.
I don't need to cite statistics to know how dangerous SF is. I've lived there an experienced it. I've also been to Atlanta, Chicago, and Houston and felt much safer.
First step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one and San Francisco even refused to do that.
Statistically, these things didn’t happen to you.
You're talking about Prop 47, and the number is $950. There's some pretty widespread misconceptions about Prop 47, first of which is that theft under that amount is not "legal" - it's just a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
But I think something much more important to recognize is that this law is hardly a uniquely Californian affair. Texas, of all places, has an equivalent law, except its limit is $2500 - higher than California's: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-pun...
Also, worth mentioning that Walgreens, which was generally the franchise most known for citing SF crime while closing stores, later backpedalled those concerns: https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2023/01/09/walgree...
That said, SF does undeniably still have one of the highest larceny theft rates in the future, and it has plenty of work to do on that front. But you'd be right to be skeptical of anecdotal evidence that the city is outright dysfunctional. At the very least, you shouldn't believe anyone who states SF's problems are the fault of any single simple cause, whether that be Prop 47 or Chesa Boudin.
So what, if it is not enforced? Good luck getting away with that in Texas or almost any state or likely many other areas of California.
> But I think something much more important to recognize is that this law is hardly a uniquely Californian affair. Texas, of all places, has an equivalent law, except its limit is $2500 - higher than California's: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-pun...
Unlike in Texas, misdemeanors aren't taken seriously at all in California (i.e., the charges are usually dropped), to the point that things that don't reach the bar of being a felony are de facto legal.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Paxton#Legal_issues
This way any theft/shoplifting that skips checkout is an automatic felony.
If the city want's to f##k you with b#llsh#t number juggling, you do the same to them.
This might be my bias, I should be OK with drug addicts strung out on the sidewalk, I'm just privileged, blah blah. Don't care. ~6 years ago we went out to get lunch with a company I was visiting, and a guy came onto the patio and just screamed at the top of his lungs for several minutes before walking away. Everyone there just considered it normal, the servers kept serving, everyone just stared at their plates or phones as this screaming banshee went "AHHHH AHHH AHHHH [breathe] AHH AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHH" among everyone eating. Absurd. How do you live like this?
But I suppose the question is what legal remedy is there for someone yelling at you? What would you like to have happened to this guy?
The yelling guy was almost certainly a drug user, so you shouldn't need a legal remedy for yelling, since you should have one for using drugs.
Let's invent a job that's not even law enforcement, where the duties are to accept assignment to monitor another citizen for arbitrary rulebreaking until they do so, at which point this employee records the offense with their perpetually-recording device (which we can imagine to be thermo-electrically powered so as to not even need one of those annoying off switches modern LE are so fond of actuating).
Hire criteria will have to be at least a masters degree in order to absorb the excess baristas in the labor market, and our main character can start off nonplussed by the job but at least it pays better than selling tech bros and babes steamed "milk" with various additives (aside: is there an appropriately gender-neutral infantilizing term for the non-cis?), and Hiro Protagonist needs to pay down their educational debt.
Over the course of the story we can enjoy the waffling between "this is a very important job", "i really need to make my student loan payment for once this quarter", and "holy doodle I'm really doing Satan/Capital's own work out here" as the character: builds personal relationships with the monitored classes (let's throw annoying children in to prod a proper diversity of pearl clutchers!); observes the necessity of pruning their own habitats of undesirables; and grows familiar with the Karens who file monitoring requests (and their variously un/reasonable monitoring requests).
We can even throw a crumb to the SV satire tropes and structure their employer as a Citizen-alike "private policing" disruptor -- this will be an excellent JPod-style send-up of the gig economy.
For bonus points, really play up the internal torture this main character endures as their finger hovers over the "request monitoring" button for the variously ill in their own neighborhood. I think they should start off entirely repulsed by the notion of calling the cops on their fellow franchisee, but eventually get beaten into cognitive submission to the new model.
This is gold, josephcsible! If only we could get it through the reams of LLM pap clogging the traditional sci-fi outlets.
I couldn't actually sketch the twist and denounment, that'd be actually...writing.
TFA is right in that in other cities the crime is mostly gang related vs SF where the victims are mostly ordinary people going about their business.
Back then SF was a total shit hole (literally), I can't imagine what it's like now.
For better or worse, this exists in most cities. It’s absolutely not unique to any one city. Not saying this is a good thing or something we shouldn’t try to fix.
Also this guy wasn’t dangerous. You can see it with your own eyes but this guy is inconvenient and annoying but not dangerous.
SF only allows hotels in one corner of the city, and that’s very close to a bad areas. Most of SF is safe to walk at 2am, and i do it daily when i walk my dog. Tourists disproportionately see the worst of the city. We should be trying to make it better everywhere, but tourists really get the worst view of it.
I’m very sorry you had a bad experience on your trips, the city has a lot more to offer, and I hope you’ll be able to experience a different side of it one day.
And I myself from a third world country, so the bar of safe city is not that high.
I say all of this not because of Fox News, or because I never saw another big city, or any other excuse. But because I believe SF is a beautiful city that needs to get their act together.
I don’t know why I even care. I live in an amazing, safe, large city where I raise children and the police arrest criminals. Whatever, enjoy living in a combat zone.
NY does the exact same thing to socially disruptive people that the folks describe in the story: ignore them. In fact I’m pretty sure we do it better than any other city.
But in the moment you don’t know that. What you do know is this person is obviously not acting in an appropriate manner consistent with the expected societal norms for pretty much everywhere in the world except SF. That means they may be more capable of other behaviors outside the norm and that makes them dangerous. That’s enough for most people to be put into a defensive mode in that kind of encounter—causing people to feel unsafe during an encounter that may ultimately just turn out to be annoying and inconvenient.
Not to the same extent as SF, it's a disaster, I have quite literally been to cities in third world countries that are better. If I had to choose between London and a place that's half as bad as SF I'd still choose London.
It seems to be driven principally by emotion, chooses odd stats to make it's points, and when it talks about decriminalization of "things" it doesn't get any more specific than I just did.
I get that the author is angry; understandably so. I think there is a coherent argument to be made supporting the author's assertions. I just don't think this author in this post has actually advanced their own point. I do think that it is critical for a serious, as opposed to emotional, response to what the author is seeing to be made. Otherwise worse for San Francisco is on the way.
So, while these may be somewhat emotional arguments, San Francisco has a serious problem that I see it doing nothing to address, which is why I left in 2018, and many people continue to just deny it has any problem at all, hiding behind these "stats" among other things.
The first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one and San Francisco won't even do that.
I saw this same idea in the San Francisco subreddit today, and it's the first time I've ever heard of expressing crime per square mile as any kind of statistic. It seems like reaching for some way in which San Francisco is extraordinary when it's realized that the per capita crime numbers aren't particularly out of line with any other major US city.
But other cities have crime too. I live in south Texas, and anecdotally my house was broken into twice in 2021, my parent's neighbors' house was left vacant and was subsequently ransacked and had a vehicle stolen as well. Just this week their electrician's shop was burgled and only a strong gate prevented the thieves from getting away with his truck, but they still stole $20K in tools and wire. A few years ago one of my co-workers was shot to death by his wife.
It's clear that San Francisco has some idiosyncrasies of its own, but I think the US is just a particularly dangerous country in the developed world.
Anecdotally.
"how much more dense that crime is in San Francisco" ... does this comparison control for population density?
Here in St. Louis we have a District Attorney who ran on an activist platform of some kind who, like the San Francisco DA who was eventually recalled, just didn't prosecute. Over and over. Car thefts, sex crimes, whatever. Murder charges get re-filed and re-filed. Grumble grumble grumble.
The flashpoint was a recent event in which one of the guys whom she ought have to have sent to jail a long time back (violated probation boundaries over ninety times according to his ankle monitor, among other things), got pretty excited to drive and some teenage girl from a visiting volleyball league is now minus her legs, because this guy wasn't much of a driver. Bang! And grumble grumble grumble is now a lot of noise.
I suspect this is similar. We'll probably find someone with an awful lot of priors, maybe a violated parole, did the stabbing, and then folks will say, "Well, if this guy was in the slam like he belongs, this wouldn't have happened." Bob Lee may serve as the unfortunate face of some unpleasant statistics.
which is false, unsurprisingly.
bulglaries ... prosecutors had filed charges in about 66% of the cases and filed motions to revoke probation in about 82% of cases.
prosecuted 35 of 61 (57%) sexual assault cases requested for prosecution by police.
what you point out is the real tragedy. due to the brutal level of overall crime the small ones slip through the system. which results in criminals going free for a long time. the level of deterrence is very low.
on top of all this the prison system makes things worse, but there's currently no alternative. it's a multifaceted systemic problem (underfunded overly-brutal and excessively inefficient police department, politicized prosecution, underfunded public defender system, and the cherry on top is the lack of reintegration for convicts; the probation system is unnecessarily cruel and also inefficient)
There's actually no real sources cited, and no actual statistics cited so this blog post is garbage. I'm sorry his friend died in a horrible way, but it should not lead to knee-jerk emotion-based reactions that are not based in reality
> When you do the math, the incidents of all types per square mile in San Francisco is by far and away the highest in the country with zero comparison
Well yes, because crime rates are a product of population not land area. It should not be surprising that SF with a population of 874k in 49 square miles has more crime per square mile than, say Charlotte 873k in 309 square miles.
I am not saying crime is low in SF, I'm saying "I don't like this relevant comparison so I will use this other one" isn't super helpful.
> If San Francisco were as large as Atlanta, Chicago, etc. its stats would reveal a completely different story.
Yes, because the population if it were the size of Atlanta it would have 2.4 million people, e.g. almost five times the population.
> Most of the victims are innocent civilians. Just watch the news
What are the actual statistics here - I could believe this claim, but citing the news isn't relevant because its biased in favor of reporting crime against civilians (man bites dog vs dog bites man).
> Lastly, San Francisco has decriminalized so many things that used to be crimes that now, magically, they no longer show up in the statistics
I agree with this statement. The crime rates in the Castro would be much higher if we hadn't decriminalized homosexuality. Crime rates in the mission would be much higher if weed remained illegal. Of course, you'd also gets spikes in crime rates if you made it illegal to have unoccupied residential property, or made labor code violations criminal rather than civil code violations.
I get that this guy's friend has been murdered but to pretend the issue is that crimes statistics lie isn't going to stop it happening. It seems much more likely to me that the core issue is that the typical divide in US cities between affluent areas and poor areas does not exist in SF, and by proxy the gap between high and low crime regions doesn't exist. I'm sure plenty of people in plenty of cities have areas they don't walk through but SF makes that impossible.
San Francisco, CA: Population: 883,305, City Area: 46.87 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 7,845.3, Crime rate per square mile: 7,603.9
Baltimore, MD: Population: 593,490, City Area: 80.94 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 5,182.7, Crime rate per square mile: 2,421.3
Detroit, MI: Population: 673,104, City Area: 139.44 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 4,548.0, Crime rate per square mile: 1,599.8
Milwaukee, WI: Population: 590,157, City Area: 96.12 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 3,784.1, Crime rate per square mile: 1,199.9
Cleveland, OH: Population: 381,009, City Area: 82.47 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 3,341.1, Crime rate per square mile: 1,213.7
St. Louis, MO: Population: 300,576, City Area: 62.06 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 3,194.6, Crime rate per square mile: 1,110.7
Albuquerque, NM: Population: 564,651, City Area: 189.52 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 3,472.8, Crime rate per square mile: 482.6
Memphis, TN: Population: 650,618, City Area: 324.00 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 3,949.5, Crime rate per square mile: 616.8
Kansas City, MO: Population: 495,327, City Area: 319.03 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 1,322.8, Crime rate per square mile: 985.4
Nashville, TN: Population: 670,820, City Area: 475.10 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 1,008.5, Crime rate per square mile: 909.9
Indianapolis, IN: Population: 877,335, City Area: 368.02 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 1,049.5, Crime rate per square mile: 740.7
Columbus, OH: Population: 898,553, City Area: 223.11 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 1,150.6, Crime rate per square mile: 730.9
Philadelphia, PA: Population: 1,584,064, City Area: 134.18 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 968.9, Crime rate per square mile: 617.9
Los Angeles, CA: Population: 3,971,883, City Area: 468.67 sq mi, Crime rate per 100,000 people: 585.8, Crime rate per square mile: 349.2
(Answer courtesy of ChatGPT)
Of course Houston has low crime per square mile, it's automobile sprawl hell. Walking across a dang parking lot takes 5 minutes.
> Second, most crime in these other cities is gang on gang. In San Francisco, that's not the case. Most of the victims are innocent civilians. Just watch the news.
Big, fat, stinking, CITATION NEEDED. Just watch the news...really?? That's your source, local news crime scare television?
Want real numbers? Go here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Sort by Murder and Nonnegligant Manslaughter.
San Francisco ranks 66th out of 100, with the rank of 1 being worst. In other words, it's below average in terms of crime.
More homicidal cities include Phoenix, Denver, and many other cities that are generally considered to be safe places to be.
Author: I understand your friend just died and that's really rough but that's not an excuse to throw objectivity out of the window. I see you’re an expert in startups, business, and engineering, and while you’re probably really smart it might be wise to accept that you might not be an expert in this area.