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Some Maps and statistics about San Francisco criminality: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-fra

• PeterisP 5y ago
  A major point that this article is making is that all these statistics are misleading because stores and individuals have systematically stopped reporting most property crime incidents as it's worthless effort because nothing gets done about the reports. Data-driven decisions don't work if you have really bad source data.
  • prussian 5y ago
    This seems strange to me though. How does one collect on insurance without it being reported to the police? Are businesses and individuals just eating the cost or are adjusters just writing out checks without a police report?
    • quanticle 5y ago
      The article points out that businesses are eating the cost until they can't tolerate it any more, then they're leaving. The example cited was that of Walgreens closing 17 stores in San Francisco because of shoplifting related losses.
    • 6f8986c3 5y ago
      Police don’t send out officers to take reports for minor crimes. I know more than a few cops, and current SOP is to ignore anything that isn’t an immediate threat to life.
    • refurb 5y ago
      Does insurance pay out for shoplifting? Do store owners even buy that insurance? Can you even get that insurance in SF? What are the deductibles? What happens to your rates when you make a claim? I could see for big ticket retailers (jewelry, etc) insurance against theft makes sense, but CVS? When people steal $100 worth of makeup?
      • ericbarrett 5y ago
        There is "commercial crime insurance" (separate from general business insurance) but I can't imagine an underwriter staying in the San Francisco market. And a large retailer like CVS, Walgreens, or Target would almost certainly be self-insured.
        • jkhdigital 5y ago
          Are you using “self-insured” as a euphemism for “just eats the losses”? Because it’s not really insurance if there’s no risk pooling, and a large retailer is a single entity—who are they pooling risk from? Individual stores? That would make sense only if they are franchises.
          • mbg721 5y ago
            They may not be pooling risk, but they may be hiring actuaries to look at their past losses compared to similar businesses, and setting aside a reserve to cover expected future risk.
            • jkhdigital 5y ago
              I’m sure that’s exactly what they do, but that’s not insurance—just prudent risk management.
          • refurb 5y ago
            That’s basically what self-insured is. Large employers offer health insurance but they aren’t pooling risk with other companies, they just pay all expenses. Insurance is meant to protect against catastrophic loss. If a loss isn’t catastrophic, it’s often cheaper to just pay for the loss yourself.
    • drdec 5y ago
      Any kind of meaningful coverage for shoplifting can't be dependent on having police reports. Under normal circumstances it is the shoplifting you don't know about that causes losses. I suspect that stores do not have insurance for shoplifting, but perhaps someone with first hand knowledge could weigh in.
      • jkhdigital 5y ago
        I don’t have first hand knowledge but I would bet all my Bitcoin that retailers do not have “shoplifting insurance”. There seems to be a common but deeply flawed belief that businesses can and do insure against literally every bad thing that could ever happen to them. Anyone with personal experience dealing with health or dental insurance should be well aware that insurance companies are in the business of covering (and paying out) as little as possible and there’s no reason to believe this dynamic is any different for a corporate customer.
    • jkhdigital 5y ago
      Under normal circumstances, insurance protects against unlikely but catastrophic events (health insurance in the US is a weird exception). Even if shoplifting insurance exists, I can’t imagine how it would be cheaper than just eating the loss.
    • dcolkitt 5y ago
      You will never in a million years find an insurance carrier to underwrite a policy that covers shoplifting in Union Square. If you do, please let me know, I want to short the hell out of their stock.
    • dionidium 5y ago
      Retail stores expect some baseline amount of theft. For an individual, theft is a rare, unexpected, maybe even insurable event. Not so for stores. They expect theft. You don't generally insure against things you expect to happen.
    • thereare5lights 5y ago
      They don't collect because the level of shoplifting is so high that collecting on insurance would be financially a net negative due to premium increases.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• dionidium 5y ago
  In addition to the point about under-reporting, which was already made here, the drop in tourists and commuters may also be masking a rise in crime in the data. To understand this, you first have to realize that crime is typically overstated in destination neighborhoods, because visitors to the neighborhood are not counted in the denominator of most crime statistics, which are calculated by dividing the number of incidents by the number of permanent residents. Given two neighborhoods with identical official crime rates, the one with more daily visitors actually has a much lower true rate. But in a year where the visitors fell off a cliff, you could have a drop in the number of incidents, which would show a decrease in crime in the official stats, even if there was actually an increase in the true rate of crime.