6 ms·
I did the math. SF is 2.6x more dangerous per sq mi than any other US city
- gsibble 4y agoSources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/105IDODri5Qbi3Mj-SGHFUwkfEzt4pAXA4qsprHRzdmo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/105IDODri5Qbi3Mj-SGHF...
- gsibble 4y agoThis means you witness and see much more crime as a resident and why living in SF is such a different experience than any other US city.
- Imnimo 4y agoThat assumes that both your presence and the crime are equally distributed over area. If SF annexed a thousand square miles of crimeless, uninhabited wilderness, that would vastly decrease its crime per square mile, but would it affect how much crime each resident sees?
- iaseiadit 4y agoThe stat indicates there’s moderately high crime evenly distributed, or very high crime throughout a significant portion of the city, or extraordinarily high crime in smaller isolated areas. It’s the second of those (and OP is right, it’s hard to avoid crime if you live here and can’t confine yourself at all times to a few safe residential areas) but none of those outcomes are good.
- Imnimo 4y agoSure, but some of the comparison cities (e.g. Memphis and Albuquerque) have huge areas of undeveloped land within their city limits. There's no good reason to compute a per square mile statistic given the vastly different definitions of what constitutes each city.
- object-a 4y agoDon't know why you're being downvoted -- there are parts of Chicago that are 2x as dense as San Francisco, and parts that are less than 1/10th as dense. The denser parts of Chicago hold about the same number of people as San Francisco. If you wanted to use this metric, you'd need to compare the incidents per square mile of different neighborhoods or city centers. Just doing incidents/mi^2 for a whole city is nonsense
- bushbaba 4y agoMore crime incidents doesn’t mean more dangerous. For example a shooting is substantially worse than say petty theft without any victim physical damage.
- more_corn 4y agoGeneral lawlessness leads to violent crime. If people can get away with anything, some of them will just do anything they want. It’s just a hop skip and a jump from stealing to robbery to murder.
- DoctorOW 4y agoThat's ridiculous. The motivations are completely different.
- codersfocus 4y agoWhere do people’s motivations come from? You’re unenlightened if you think it’s ridiculous. People do a lot of things just out of sheer mimicry. If you air suicidal programming on TV, suicides reliably go up in the broadcast area. Anyway, this specific area was already researched, it is called the Broken Windows theory. “According to a 2001 study of crime trends in New York City by Kelling and William Sousa, rates of both petty and serious crime fell significantly after the aforementioned policies were implemented.”
- EdwardDiego 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
- bequanna 4y agoThis is exact same attitude that has gotten SF into this mess.
- mixdup 4y agoPer square mile is not useful. Crime rates are related to people. People commit crimes, not land. This is a made up statistic whose only useful purpose is to make San Francisco go to the top of a list it otherwise would not. It's why crimes are reported per capita
- fundad 4y agoIt’s the only way to make sound like it’s safer to live in the country.
- willidiots 4y agoOP's document lists 11 cities for comparison and says nothing about living in the country.
- yucky 4y agoEverybody knows it's safer to live in the country, but that's not the argument he's making. He's saying it's also safer to live in any other city. I don't know if it's a great methodology though, going per sq mile.
- yencabulator 4y agoDunno, traffic accident probability are usually per mile driven, and rural people drive more to get anywhere. Some counties have a single ambulance, and are 1-2 hours from a hospital. Where I live, there's only volunteer fire departments. That can't be great either. People just love hating on SF and/or cities in general, and will dig up any statistic that supports their viewpoint.
- ALittleLight 4y agoI think it can get to perception of how safe or dangerous a place is. If there are lots of crimes happening all around you as walk around a city, that can obviously seem more unsafe than if you're driving about the countryside and only rarely pass criminal activity. Even if crimes per capita are equal the perception of danger is much greater in the former than the latter.
- bfrog 4y agoIncome inequality and crime correlate? Would love to see some studies.
- EdwardDiego 4y agohttps://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2022/08/01/is-the-risk-of-crime-against-businesses-greater-in-more-unequal-countries/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2022/08/01... https://journalofeconomicstructures.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40008-020-00220-6#Sec4 https://journalofeconomicstructures.springeropen.com/article... https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/INEQUALI.PDF https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/IN... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-stark-relationship-between-income-inequality-and-crime https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...
- IndoorPatio 4y ago+1
- truthposter1488 4y ago[flagged]
- endisneigh 4y agoI’d be more interested in square mile “zones” and seeing which zones are the most dangerous. Separately you could see which cities contain the most “dangerous zones”.
- joeman1000 4y agoYou’d need each crime to be reported with it’s location. Import them as ‘points’ in a Geopandas dataframe, import LA statistical reporting zones as a separate dataframe of polygons, then for each crime point, get the zone it falls within, then group by the zones.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWhat is the SI unit for danger?
- gerikson 4y agoWell it won't be derived from a medieval measure like "square mile".
- marginalia_nu 4y agoPlague ships / decaport equivalents, surely.
- shrimp_emoji 4y agoAn 80-character line of C code
- EdwardDiego 4y agoToo Quiets per second.
- lordchair 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
- yongjik 4y agoOn the other hand, I'm sure it also has the highest amount of total stock grants per square mile. Which is a totally valid statistics and proves that SF is the city to live if you want to succeed as a software engineer.
- Beaver117 4y agoVote with your wallet. Leave SF and let the people who want to defend it so badly deal with the crime.
- fwlr 4y agoCrime isn’t equally distributed; criminality isn’t equally distributed; sensitivity to crime isn’t equally distributed; tolerance of criminality isn’t equally distributed. A quick informal sketch of why the “SF is hell / no it isn’t, here’s the stats, there are other places with higher crime rates / well I know SF is hell, here’s a synthetic statistic that puts SF at the top and thus reflects my experience / that synthetic statistic is bullshit / well my experience is not bullshit, so here’s another synthetic statistic” loop happens so often: Feeling safe is important to people. People have limited mobility and spend it to move themselves into areas (cities, districts, suburbs, streets, city blocks) where they feel safe. Due to a constellation of interacting factors, highly crime-sensitive individuals are exposed to high-criminality areas at a higher rate in SF than in most other places. Quick/dirty/concrete example of what I mean: I’ve lived in Sydney, New York, and San Francisco. All three places have high crime areas. In Sydney, I never see them. In NY, I saw them through the window of a Metro-North train. In SF, I saw them outside my apartment window.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI believe you have put into words my sense of things over the last few days, and it could probably be put bluntly as something like "crime is happening to privileged people in San Francisco and they're shocked by it".
- fwlr 4y agoMy initial thought that sparked this comment was indeed “it should be ‘crime per hacker news commenter’ not ‘crime per square mile’”, and then I tried to make it more useful.