11 ms·

Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco

118 points by jdkee 4y ago

ProAm 4y ago
938 crimes per square mile in SF [1] It will never get better, you cannot build a moat big enough to insulate yourself there. [1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime
- Overtonwindow 4y ago
  What percentage would you add to account for crimes? That are not reported?
- gadders 4y ago
  Maybe we could invent a place to put criminals so they are away from regular law abiding folks. This might even be a solved problem. [Yes /sarcasm obviously]
  - kube-system 4y ago
    The place where they used to put criminals is the only place in SF with a moat big enough to keep the criminals away! :D But on a serious note, mental health and addiction is not solved by prisons.
    - gadders 4y ago
      Serious question, but why would SF have more of a mental health and addiction problem than other cities? The climate would be nicer in, say, LA or the Carolinas so it's not weather-related.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        I'm not sure that SF does have more of a mental health or addiction problem. It certainly is visible in SF, but other cities have worse statistics depending on what specifically you're measuring. eg: https://drexel.edu/uhc/resources/briefs/BCHC%20Drug%20Overdose/ https://drexel.edu/uhc/resources/briefs/BCHC%20Drug%20Overdo... I'd say the reason it is more visible in SF is due to a combination of the density, walkability, and policies that don't hide the problem as much behind locked doors.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Don't we already try that approach more than any other place in the world? Is the problem solved?
    - gadders 4y ago
      Do they try that in SF? My understanding was that they moved away from this model. And it doesn't have to be jail if they have mental health or whatever issues. Just put the people that hurt other people in a place where they can't hurt other people.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        They moved away from it because it doesn't work. It's not working anywhere else either, why would they go back to it? The name doesn't matter call it what you want but when you take a stigmatized group widely considered criminal and a nuisance, not rightly or "correctly" part of society and put them in a place they are not free to leave atrocities are inevitable. And why even them in the first place? Why is the conversation not about jailing a landlord who evicts someone in mental health crisis? They've caused plenty harm.
        gadders 4y ago
        Whatever they're doing or not doing now is clearly worse. Again I'd ask why the problem is worse in SF than other American cities with better climates.
        giraffe_lady 4y ago
        It's a good question! The climate isn't unique but I think the economic and income dynamics may be. Either way though "this isn't working so let's do the other thing we know also doesn't work" isn't a very rigorous approach. I get the frustration but we know that wouldn't solve it, because it didn't solve it there and hasn't solved it anywhere.
        LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
- postalrat 4y ago
  938 crimes per square mile is quite low considering how long people have been there.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  sure you can, that's what they do in J burg. All the wealthy white people have electric security fences around their house and private security guards to protect them.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Let's see of Elon does that for the TitterX HQ.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > crimes per square mile What... a stupid measure.
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    Made up by a Pacific islander? Canadian?
tablespoon 4y ago
[flagged]
causi 4y ago
On a recent HN discussion on crime in SF, someone said one of the reasons it's so visible is that high income and low income sections are adjacent and intertwined. Is this true? More importantly if perhaps more crassly, is it worth it? Does not keeping your crime isolated to the "bad part of town" result in a meaningful drop in the overall crime rate?
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Not it's visible because the victims have more money than the average one, and they are not used to be attacked, so it makes a lot of noise.
- billythemaniam 4y ago
  Specifically on high/low income intertwined, yes. There is certainly some segmentation, but there are also places where one street is good and the very next street is bad and the next street is good. It's an interesting city for sure.
- 0zemp1c 4y ago
  SF is 7 miles across, by size it is tiny probably the very best place in SF is the corner of Broadway and Broderick...still within half a mile of a tent camp
- alephnerd 4y ago
  It definetly plays a role. For example, the Whole Foods that shut down in the gentrified area around 9th street is a couple blocks from Hyde & Turk - which is the main drug market in the city. The high rises along 5th Street near Moscone are adjacent to the SROs and homeless shelters on 6th. Similar stuff in Mission District and Polk Street/Lower Nob Hill as well - a lot of older SROs/cheap apartments got converted into Hotels, Airbnbs, or resold as condos. And despite all this, no one noticed the intergenerational poverty and gun crime in the Projects in Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley because they are cut off from the rest of the city.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  Yes. West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) consistently get talked about with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty. People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed at by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment. But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness. The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter. There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former. The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
0zemp1c 4y ago
just move SF will probably never be "solved" people have been trying to "solve" SF since the 90s, it has only become worse every year SF has to hit total Haiti-grade rock-bottom before it can be repaired, maybe in five years until then, just go somewhere else and live your life
drunner 4y ago
I went to the bay area once for vacation, so I have no real horse in this race besides I wish the best for humanity. Its tough to balance reading https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Chesa-Boudin-London-Breed-16751930.php https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che... that kinda shows crime is average for a large US city with the Bell Riots in the DS9 storyline https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots as an outsider. Either way, shouldn't San Fran have plenty of money from all the tech there and plenty of extra office real estate from covid to try and put a dent in all the circumstances that lead up to someone needing to steal or getting addicted to drugs? Probably too optimistic of a take ...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fwip 4y ago
  The number one driver of theft and drug addiction is poverty. Unless SF commits to ending poverty, which they likely won't or can't, they won't address the causes of homelessness. SF is especially "bad" because it has an incredibly high cost-of-living. If you're living in the area without a high-paying (tech) job, you're very likely to be only one or two surprises away from losing your housing.
- saulpw 4y ago
  They are throwing tons of money at the problem, and it isn't helping. Money doesn't solve problems by itself.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  I think the relevant distinction is concentration. In other US cities with relatively high crime - the crime is concentrated in certain neighborhood and is heavily related to gang activity. So you provided you can avoid certain areas, you generally are able to avoid most crime. In SF the criminality has spilt out to have a broader impact in a way the aggregate statistics might not show. Previous advice that you would probably be safe anywhere in the city other than the tenderloin no longer applies.
- 4y ago
darth_avocado 4y ago
The most frustrating part about the conversation is that politics takes away the fundamental fact that what is happening in the city is not normal and there is no one else to blame for it other than the city officials, not the pandemic, not the wfh tech workers, just the city.
- johndhi 4y ago
  Why? I'm happy to blame the city official partially, but isn't it significant that SF, more than other big cities, was dependent on tech tenants who have largely gone remote?
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Not really, most were in SV.
- koolba 4y ago
  > … no one else to blame for it other than the city officials, not the pandemic, not the wfh tech workers, just the city. People elect the government they deserve.
  - fortissimohn 4y ago
    That assumes no corruption. Hard to partake in the democratic process when kickbacks and bought votes exist.
  - antognini 4y ago
    As H.L. Mencken put it, "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and that they deserve to get it, good and hard."
  - gautamdivgi 4y ago
    That's not entirely true. You may not live in SF but only work in SF. In this situation you have no say in SF government because your voting rights are based on where you stay and not where you work. Maybe there needs to be a way to better distribute your vote? If you're in a place for about 1/2 your waking hours of the week, maybe you should get a say in the government of that place? Edit: This is a situation with most metro areas. Definitely with Chicago where there is a large contingent of folks who commute from the suburbs.
jacooper 4y ago
> Tragic video shows dying Cash App founder Bob Lee was ignored by bystanders as he begged for help after being stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday…Footage showed Lee lifted his shirt to show [a] driver his two stab wounds — but collapsed to the ground as the car drove off…Lee raised one arm in an attempt to flag down [another] car and jumped back onto his feet, but the driver sped away… This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?
- hartator 4y ago
  > This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people? Would you have acted differently? Specially if you risk going to jail yourself if you have to use violence?
  - johndhi 4y ago
    Personally, I think my reaction to seeing extremely violent crime would be to run away and try not to get involved. I'm not going to watch the video, but that was my first thought. When bleeding homeless people have come up to me in SF (not uncommon) I usually just try to move on. I assume a similar reaction here, though I don't know if I'd have been able to tell this was a Normal Person who was dying.
    - kdkdodlem 4y ago
      Being approached by bleeding homeless is not uncommon in SF? As a more rural person, the nonchalance with which you deliver that statement is _shocking_ and is sort of ironic because if I was to claim such a thing was common in SF or that it's insane that it's normalized there, my friends who live in the city would be very offended, take it personally, and tell me how wrong I am I think a lot of citizens have rose colored glasses. I just can't figure any other way to square my horrifying personal experiences in the city and anecdotes like this one with the impassioned defense the city receives whenever it is criticized
      - popcalc 4y ago
bitwize 4y ago
This is the "no peace" bit of "no justice, no peace". Law enforcement and the judicial system in the USA generally have squandered the trust placed in them because of systemic racism and the need to flex their power over ordinary people. Now those chickens are coming home to roost, as in SF they find they can't act at all without stirring up an abuse-of-power scandal. So they just let criminals go free and do their thing.
shapefrog 4y ago
[flagged]
tlogan 4y ago
Politicians will always try to make numbers to fit their agenda. For example, the stats say that human trafficking is down but street prostitution is out of control (like on Copa St [1]). I have no idea how they made up these numbers but they did. So good for them - smart. Anyway, the only how to fix this problem is to get involved. Contact your supervisor, police capital, etc. Be persistent. That is all I can say. [1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/neighbors-complain-of-rampant-prostitution-illegal-activity-on-san-franciscos-capp-street.amp https://www.ktvu.com/news/neighbors-complain-of-rampant-pros...
freejazz 4y ago
I'm not in SF but so many of the responses here seem highly reactive in their politicization and catastrophization of the issue. I'm in NYC, and if you were to go the subreddit for it, you'd see similar claims, which IMO, are completely off-base. Can anyone provide me w/ a reasonable take?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  I mean what are you looking for? People are sharing anecdotes because sUpPoSeDlY the statistics say it’s 100% A-OK and nothing to see here. SF has reached a tipping point and the wildly inflated values of multi-million dollar condos and trophy commercial buildings are falling fall enough to start putting serious wealth at risk.
- ipnon 4y ago
  Crime in NYC is unevenly distributed. Property crimes mostly in business districts, violent crimes mostly in a few neighborhoods with gangs. If someone lives in areas most popular with well-payed software engineers like the Villages or North Brooklyn they will not encounter most of this crime. The NYPD is as large as some nation’s standing armies for a good reason, it stops crime in certain areas effectively.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  Every single city subreddit and local discussion is focused on crime and how high it is. 1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up. 2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared. It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it. 3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty. People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment. But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness. The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter. There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former. The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
marcus0x62 4y ago
The last time I was in San Francisco was January of 2020 - I was staying near the convention center and I was surprised by how open the drug use had become. I’d been traveling the city off and on for around 20 years, and while you could always find someone doing drugs if you went looking, I wasn’t used to seeing groups of people huddled on the sidewalk openly injecting what I imagine was heroin and/or fentanyl. Nobody seemed to mind. I also saw a guy who was so out of his mind on something, leaning up against a mailbox, that it took him several seconds to realize his pants had fallen down and several more to do something about it. This gentleman was not wearing any underwear. Again, it didn’t seem to shock or bother any of the numerous people walking by, some of them with small children. It was very, very strange.
pydry 4y ago
It seems that the skyrocketing rents that pushed people out on to the streets are biting back.
- jtms 4y ago
  hmmm... it's almost like they should build more dense housing or something
russdpale 4y ago
I go to SF multiple times a week, this post is straight up fear mongering propaganda and everyone is dumber for having read it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
0xB31B1B 4y ago
So much of the problem in SF comes down to the progressive politician types who only want to things that "impact the root causes of crime" and its extremely frustrating and frequently just plain wrong. Yes, you do not solve the "root problem of why people choose to commit crime" by putting repeat offenders in jail, but you do make the world way better for everyone else who is not a criminal. Poor people, immigrants, the downtrodden all disproportionately benefit from tough on crime policies because they are the people for whom have the least resources to isolate themselves from the chaos and antisocial behaviors of the worst among us. Its not a white kids in the marina that need to walk past piles of shit and needles to get to school, its the poor immigrant kids in the tenderloin who need to deal with this.
- Clubber 4y ago
  So I believe we put too many people in jail for too long. I think our justice system is pretty broken. Having said that, to fix it I never thought of just letting people commit crimes like areas in California seem to be doing. That's just as asinine but in the other direction. I always imagined giving people much lighter sentences for most things and if they repeat, then give them harsher and harsher sentences. Only the worst repeat offenders would get what they get today. I imagined not overcharging people hoping to scare someone into a plea. I imagined police not being able to interrogate and lie to children without a parent present. I imagined getting rid of pre textual stops to get innocent people's id's. I imagined "I smell marijuana," as not allowable probable cause. I imagined removing most K9 units. I imagined removing most SWAT units except for the largest cities. I imagined being able to remove bad police, bad prosecutors and bad judges from their positions of power. I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.
  - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
    The guy who hit the marina person on the head with a pipe was considered a "frequent flyer" by the SF police. They have tons (like 20+) of complaints against this person and the group they live with for various things like drug use, menacing behavior, starting fights, stealing, etc. A few businesses on the street have restraining orders on this person preventing them from entering for example the walgreens. A large issue we have with our criminal justice system in CA/SF right now is that "low level" non felony crimes (like theft of less than 950 dollars, public drug use, pooping in the street, menacing others), are treated more or less like an administrative issue and the criminal might be fined, but they won't be jailed, and there isn't an escalation policy where more and more low level crimes result in an escalation of consequences. This means that people can repeatedly perform extremely anti social behaviors (street shitting, public meth smoking, stealing 200 dollars of whatever from a store, threatening people and screaming) over and over and over again without an escalation of consequences for their actions. There is an escalation policy for things like murder or other felony crimes, but these escalations usually take a long time, and the end result is the repeat offenders do kill or cause serious harm before they are put in prison and taken out of society.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
> And though I don’t think anyone yet knows what the solution is WTF? yes we do. High bail Held in lockup till trial No early release from prison No consideration for race Develop philanthropic apparatus for post-incarceration employment with the presence of their ex-criminal peers This has worked for over a century until everyone was bamboozled into thinking it was inhumane by revolutionaries (aka commies)
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Wherever you are with this stuff, don't accept articles like this as a valuable, or even harmless, contribution to the discourse. It is using the terrible Twitter-based dark pattern of not actually taking a stand one way or the other, so that anybody can read the article and feel like they agree with it. Get angry, but you bring-your-own object for that anger. To demonstrate, four out of the five articles that are supposed to be "the other side" are non-editorial news articles citing crime statistics. The other one is hardly an argument to "not get angry." Whoever this person is, they spend too much time on Twitter and it really shows. Pushing and monetizing anger itself like this should be outright spotted for what it is: flame bait for clicks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
etc-hosts 4y ago
I look at posts like these as part of an orchestrated effort to have material at the ready in case Gavin Newsome or Kamala Harris run for office again.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  No orchestration is necessary. If Gavin somehow gets the Democratic nomination for president, the GOP will plaster TV with ads saying he was the mayor of the most liberal big city in the country, show videos of the TL, and quote crime stats.
  - etc-hosts 4y ago
    I suppose "orchestration" is too strong of a word.
uejfiweun 4y ago
There's some weird push right now to advance not punishing crimes as a legitimate way to deal with criminals. If you Google Search right now for "does punishing crime work", all the top results are studies on how punishing crime is evil, we need compassion not conviction, yada yada. People seem to be seizing on these studies to say "look, punishing crime doesn't work, and since you disagree with this study, you're against science and you don't deserve to be listened to." Honestly, I think the reason there are no studies proving that punishing crime works, is because it's such a brain-dead obvious conclusion that I'd guess nobody ever felt the NEED to make such a study. Society has been punishing crime for thousands of years. We've all changed our behavior to avoid punishment. If you've ever had a pet it should be perfectly obvious that avoiding punishment is an innate behavior baked into every animal and OBVIOUSLY it works to deter bad behavior. It's something as obvious to me as 2+2=4, or water is wet, or the sky is blue. Fortunately there are other cities out there with actual sane leaders. But as long as SF keeps pushing this politically-motivated, head-in-the-sand "compassion not conviction" nonsense their city will continue going to shit.
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  I tried Googling "does punishing crime work", and I got results about how some studies show it's ineffective, which is true and relevant - this does not imply that we should not punish crime for some definition of "punish", and I don't get any results about how it's "evil", or "yada yada". >I think the reason there are no studies proving that punishing crime works, is because it's such a brain-dead obvious conclusion that I'd guess nobody ever felt the NEED to make such a study. It's pretty easy to imagine how punishment might not have an appreciable effect on certain crimes in certain contexts, so it's confusing to assert that your conclusion is "brain-dead obvious". Punishment as a concept is indeed obvious, but only because it serves as an obvious outlet for our angry emotions, not because it "obviously" works effectively and in all cases. You're injecting really strongly biased/unthoughtful wording into your opinion, which is a needless distraction.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago
Der_Einzige 4y ago
If you think SF is bad, come to Portland OR. You guys don't even know how good you have it.
- jtms 4y ago
  ah Portland, where the young go to retire and live on the sidewalk... lovely place!
legitster 4y ago
San Francisco was a thriving tourist city with a hip downtown close to Silicon Valley and Berkeley. Major venture capitalists set up shop in the city for basically no other reason than they thought it was cool and they wanted to be around other cool VCs (this is based on the impression I got from Ben Horowitz's book). The whole "talent pool" was a self-fulfilling prophecy - there's no reason they couldn't have set up in more business friendly places like San Jose or Sacramento or even Nashville Tennessee for that matter. But it was always a bit of a flex of muscle to be in SF. San Francisco as a city never needed these businesses. But they came anyway. So in most cities you have city planners that work really hard to build a desirable environment for attracting talent and businesses. I think people miss the point of SF's political problems. And until Bob Lee's death, the VC class always had the money to kind of rise above San Francisco's problems and not see it for the dump it was increasingly becoming. It's as frustrating as it is needless - there are a hundred other cities in America better suited for VCs to set up shop in.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

118 points by jdkee 4y ago

938 crimes per square mile in SF [1] It will never get better, you cannot build a moat big enough to insulate yourself there. [1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime

Overtonwindow 4y ago
What percentage would you add to account for crimes? That are not reported?
gadders 4y ago
Maybe we could invent a place to put criminals so they are away from regular law abiding folks. This might even be a solved problem. [Yes /sarcasm obviously]
- kube-system 4y ago
  The place where they used to put criminals is the only place in SF with a moat big enough to keep the criminals away! :D But on a serious note, mental health and addiction is not solved by prisons.
  - gadders 4y ago
    Serious question, but why would SF have more of a mental health and addiction problem than other cities? The climate would be nicer in, say, LA or the Carolinas so it's not weather-related.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I'm not sure that SF does have more of a mental health or addiction problem. It certainly is visible in SF, but other cities have worse statistics depending on what specifically you're measuring. eg: https://drexel.edu/uhc/resources/briefs/BCHC%20Drug%20Overdose/ https://drexel.edu/uhc/resources/briefs/BCHC%20Drug%20Overdo... I'd say the reason it is more visible in SF is due to a combination of the density, walkability, and policies that don't hide the problem as much behind locked doors.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Don't we already try that approach more than any other place in the world? Is the problem solved?
  - gadders 4y ago
    Do they try that in SF? My understanding was that they moved away from this model. And it doesn't have to be jail if they have mental health or whatever issues. Just put the people that hurt other people in a place where they can't hurt other people.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      They moved away from it because it doesn't work. It's not working anywhere else either, why would they go back to it? The name doesn't matter call it what you want but when you take a stigmatized group widely considered criminal and a nuisance, not rightly or "correctly" part of society and put them in a place they are not free to leave atrocities are inevitable. And why even them in the first place? Why is the conversation not about jailing a landlord who evicts someone in mental health crisis? They've caused plenty harm.
      - gadders 4y ago
        Whatever they're doing or not doing now is clearly worse. Again I'd ask why the problem is worse in SF than other American cities with better climates.
        giraffe_lady 4y ago
        It's a good question! The climate isn't unique but I think the economic and income dynamics may be. Either way though "this isn't working so let's do the other thing we know also doesn't work" isn't a very rigorous approach. I get the frustration but we know that wouldn't solve it, because it didn't solve it there and hasn't solved it anywhere.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
postalrat 4y ago
938 crimes per square mile is quite low considering how long people have been there.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
sure you can, that's what they do in J burg. All the wealthy white people have electric security fences around their house and private security guards to protect them.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Let's see of Elon does that for the TitterX HQ.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> crimes per square mile What... a stupid measure.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Made up by a Pacific islander? Canadian?

tablespoon 4y ago

[flagged]

causi 4y ago

On a recent HN discussion on crime in SF, someone said one of the reasons it's so visible is that high income and low income sections are adjacent and intertwined. Is this true? More importantly if perhaps more crassly, is it worth it? Does not keeping your crime isolated to the "bad part of town" result in a meaningful drop in the overall crime rate?

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Not it's visible because the victims have more money than the average one, and they are not used to be attacked, so it makes a lot of noise.
billythemaniam 4y ago
Specifically on high/low income intertwined, yes. There is certainly some segmentation, but there are also places where one street is good and the very next street is bad and the next street is good. It's an interesting city for sure.
0zemp1c 4y ago
SF is 7 miles across, by size it is tiny probably the very best place in SF is the corner of Broadway and Broderick...still within half a mile of a tent camp
alephnerd 4y ago
It definetly plays a role. For example, the Whole Foods that shut down in the gentrified area around 9th street is a couple blocks from Hyde & Turk - which is the main drug market in the city. The high rises along 5th Street near Moscone are adjacent to the SROs and homeless shelters on 6th. Similar stuff in Mission District and Polk Street/Lower Nob Hill as well - a lot of older SROs/cheap apartments got converted into Hotels, Airbnbs, or resold as condos. And despite all this, no one noticed the intergenerational poverty and gun crime in the Projects in Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley because they are cut off from the rest of the city.
deanCommie 4y ago
Yes. West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) consistently get talked about with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty. People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed at by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment. But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness. The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter. There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former. The combination of the above creates the effect you see.

0zemp1c 4y ago

just move SF will probably never be "solved" people have been trying to "solve" SF since the 90s, it has only become worse every year SF has to hit total Haiti-grade rock-bottom before it can be repaired, maybe in five years until then, just go somewhere else and live your life

drunner 4y ago

I went to the bay area once for vacation, so I have no real horse in this race besides I wish the best for humanity. Its tough to balance reading https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Chesa-Boudin-London-Breed-16751930.php https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che... that kinda shows crime is average for a large US city with the Bell Riots in the DS9 storyline https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots as an outsider. Either way, shouldn't San Fran have plenty of money from all the tech there and plenty of extra office real estate from covid to try and put a dent in all the circumstances that lead up to someone needing to steal or getting addicted to drugs? Probably too optimistic of a take ...

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fwip 4y ago
The number one driver of theft and drug addiction is poverty. Unless SF commits to ending poverty, which they likely won't or can't, they won't address the causes of homelessness. SF is especially "bad" because it has an incredibly high cost-of-living. If you're living in the area without a high-paying (tech) job, you're very likely to be only one or two surprises away from losing your housing.
saulpw 4y ago
They are throwing tons of money at the problem, and it isn't helping. Money doesn't solve problems by itself.
jacobr1 4y ago
I think the relevant distinction is concentration. In other US cities with relatively high crime - the crime is concentrated in certain neighborhood and is heavily related to gang activity. So you provided you can avoid certain areas, you generally are able to avoid most crime. In SF the criminality has spilt out to have a broader impact in a way the aggregate statistics might not show. Previous advice that you would probably be safe anywhere in the city other than the tenderloin no longer applies.
4y ago

darth_avocado 4y ago

The most frustrating part about the conversation is that politics takes away the fundamental fact that what is happening in the city is not normal and there is no one else to blame for it other than the city officials, not the pandemic, not the wfh tech workers, just the city.

johndhi 4y ago
Why? I'm happy to blame the city official partially, but isn't it significant that SF, more than other big cities, was dependent on tech tenants who have largely gone remote?
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Not really, most were in SV.
koolba 4y ago
> … no one else to blame for it other than the city officials, not the pandemic, not the wfh tech workers, just the city. People elect the government they deserve.
- fortissimohn 4y ago
  That assumes no corruption. Hard to partake in the democratic process when kickbacks and bought votes exist.
- antognini 4y ago
  As H.L. Mencken put it, "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and that they deserve to get it, good and hard."
- gautamdivgi 4y ago
  That's not entirely true. You may not live in SF but only work in SF. In this situation you have no say in SF government because your voting rights are based on where you stay and not where you work. Maybe there needs to be a way to better distribute your vote? If you're in a place for about 1/2 your waking hours of the week, maybe you should get a say in the government of that place? Edit: This is a situation with most metro areas. Definitely with Chicago where there is a large contingent of folks who commute from the suburbs.

jacooper 4y ago

> Tragic video shows dying Cash App founder Bob Lee was ignored by bystanders as he begged for help after being stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday…Footage showed Lee lifted his shirt to show [a] driver his two stab wounds — but collapsed to the ground as the car drove off…Lee raised one arm in an attempt to flag down [another] car and jumped back onto his feet, but the driver sped away… This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?

hartator 4y ago
> This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people? Would you have acted differently? Specially if you risk going to jail yourself if you have to use violence?
- johndhi 4y ago
  Personally, I think my reaction to seeing extremely violent crime would be to run away and try not to get involved. I'm not going to watch the video, but that was my first thought. When bleeding homeless people have come up to me in SF (not uncommon) I usually just try to move on. I assume a similar reaction here, though I don't know if I'd have been able to tell this was a Normal Person who was dying.
  - kdkdodlem 4y ago
    Being approached by bleeding homeless is not uncommon in SF? As a more rural person, the nonchalance with which you deliver that statement is _shocking_ and is sort of ironic because if I was to claim such a thing was common in SF or that it's insane that it's normalized there, my friends who live in the city would be very offended, take it personally, and tell me how wrong I am I think a lot of citizens have rose colored glasses. I just can't figure any other way to square my horrifying personal experiences in the city and anecdotes like this one with the impassioned defense the city receives whenever it is criticized
    - popcalc 4y ago

bitwize 4y ago

This is the "no peace" bit of "no justice, no peace". Law enforcement and the judicial system in the USA generally have squandered the trust placed in them because of systemic racism and the need to flex their power over ordinary people. Now those chickens are coming home to roost, as in SF they find they can't act at all without stirring up an abuse-of-power scandal. So they just let criminals go free and do their thing.

shapefrog 4y ago

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tlogan 4y ago

Politicians will always try to make numbers to fit their agenda. For example, the stats say that human trafficking is down but street prostitution is out of control (like on Copa St [1]). I have no idea how they made up these numbers but they did. So good for them - smart. Anyway, the only how to fix this problem is to get involved. Contact your supervisor, police capital, etc. Be persistent. That is all I can say. [1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/neighbors-complain-of-rampant-prostitution-illegal-activity-on-san-franciscos-capp-street.amp https://www.ktvu.com/news/neighbors-complain-of-rampant-pros...

freejazz 4y ago

I'm not in SF but so many of the responses here seem highly reactive in their politicization and catastrophization of the issue. I'm in NYC, and if you were to go the subreddit for it, you'd see similar claims, which IMO, are completely off-base. Can anyone provide me w/ a reasonable take?

monero-xmr 4y ago
I mean what are you looking for? People are sharing anecdotes because sUpPoSeDlY the statistics say it’s 100% A-OK and nothing to see here. SF has reached a tipping point and the wildly inflated values of multi-million dollar condos and trophy commercial buildings are falling fall enough to start putting serious wealth at risk.
ipnon 4y ago
Crime in NYC is unevenly distributed. Property crimes mostly in business districts, violent crimes mostly in a few neighborhoods with gangs. If someone lives in areas most popular with well-payed software engineers like the Villages or North Brooklyn they will not encounter most of this crime. The NYPD is as large as some nation’s standing armies for a good reason, it stops crime in certain areas effectively.
deanCommie 4y ago
Every single city subreddit and local discussion is focused on crime and how high it is. 1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up. 2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared. It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it. 3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty. People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment. But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness. The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter. There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former. The combination of the above creates the effect you see.

marcus0x62 4y ago

The last time I was in San Francisco was January of 2020 - I was staying near the convention center and I was surprised by how open the drug use had become. I’d been traveling the city off and on for around 20 years, and while you could always find someone doing drugs if you went looking, I wasn’t used to seeing groups of people huddled on the sidewalk openly injecting what I imagine was heroin and/or fentanyl. Nobody seemed to mind. I also saw a guy who was so out of his mind on something, leaning up against a mailbox, that it took him several seconds to realize his pants had fallen down and several more to do something about it. This gentleman was not wearing any underwear. Again, it didn’t seem to shock or bother any of the numerous people walking by, some of them with small children. It was very, very strange.

pydry 4y ago

It seems that the skyrocketing rents that pushed people out on to the streets are biting back.

jtms 4y ago
hmmm... it's almost like they should build more dense housing or something

russdpale 4y ago

I go to SF multiple times a week, this post is straight up fear mongering propaganda and everyone is dumber for having read it.

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0xB31B1B 4y ago

So much of the problem in SF comes down to the progressive politician types who only want to things that "impact the root causes of crime" and its extremely frustrating and frequently just plain wrong. Yes, you do not solve the "root problem of why people choose to commit crime" by putting repeat offenders in jail, but you do make the world way better for everyone else who is not a criminal. Poor people, immigrants, the downtrodden all disproportionately benefit from tough on crime policies because they are the people for whom have the least resources to isolate themselves from the chaos and antisocial behaviors of the worst among us. Its not a white kids in the marina that need to walk past piles of shit and needles to get to school, its the poor immigrant kids in the tenderloin who need to deal with this.

Clubber 4y ago
So I believe we put too many people in jail for too long. I think our justice system is pretty broken. Having said that, to fix it I never thought of just letting people commit crimes like areas in California seem to be doing. That's just as asinine but in the other direction. I always imagined giving people much lighter sentences for most things and if they repeat, then give them harsher and harsher sentences. Only the worst repeat offenders would get what they get today. I imagined not overcharging people hoping to scare someone into a plea. I imagined police not being able to interrogate and lie to children without a parent present. I imagined getting rid of pre textual stops to get innocent people's id's. I imagined "I smell marijuana," as not allowable probable cause. I imagined removing most K9 units. I imagined removing most SWAT units except for the largest cities. I imagined being able to remove bad police, bad prosecutors and bad judges from their positions of power. I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  The guy who hit the marina person on the head with a pipe was considered a "frequent flyer" by the SF police. They have tons (like 20+) of complaints against this person and the group they live with for various things like drug use, menacing behavior, starting fights, stealing, etc. A few businesses on the street have restraining orders on this person preventing them from entering for example the walgreens. A large issue we have with our criminal justice system in CA/SF right now is that "low level" non felony crimes (like theft of less than 950 dollars, public drug use, pooping in the street, menacing others), are treated more or less like an administrative issue and the criminal might be fined, but they won't be jailed, and there isn't an escalation policy where more and more low level crimes result in an escalation of consequences. This means that people can repeatedly perform extremely anti social behaviors (street shitting, public meth smoking, stealing 200 dollars of whatever from a store, threatening people and screaming) over and over and over again without an escalation of consequences for their actions. There is an escalation policy for things like murder or other felony crimes, but these escalations usually take a long time, and the end result is the repeat offenders do kill or cause serious harm before they are put in prison and taken out of society.

CodeWriter23 4y ago

> And though I don’t think anyone yet knows what the solution is WTF? yes we do. High bail Held in lockup till trial No early release from prison No consideration for race Develop philanthropic apparatus for post-incarceration employment with the presence of their ex-criminal peers This has worked for over a century until everyone was bamboozled into thinking it was inhumane by revolutionaries (aka commies)

beepbooptheory 4y ago

Wherever you are with this stuff, don't accept articles like this as a valuable, or even harmless, contribution to the discourse. It is using the terrible Twitter-based dark pattern of not actually taking a stand one way or the other, so that anybody can read the article and feel like they agree with it. Get angry, but you bring-your-own object for that anger. To demonstrate, four out of the five articles that are supposed to be "the other side" are non-editorial news articles citing crime statistics. The other one is hardly an argument to "not get angry." Whoever this person is, they spend too much time on Twitter and it really shows. Pushing and monetizing anger itself like this should be outright spotted for what it is: flame bait for clicks.

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etc-hosts 4y ago

I look at posts like these as part of an orchestrated effort to have material at the ready in case Gavin Newsome or Kamala Harris run for office again.

dehrmann 4y ago
No orchestration is necessary. If Gavin somehow gets the Democratic nomination for president, the GOP will plaster TV with ads saying he was the mayor of the most liberal big city in the country, show videos of the TL, and quote crime stats.
- etc-hosts 4y ago
  I suppose "orchestration" is too strong of a word.

uejfiweun 4y ago

There's some weird push right now to advance not punishing crimes as a legitimate way to deal with criminals. If you Google Search right now for "does punishing crime work", all the top results are studies on how punishing crime is evil, we need compassion not conviction, yada yada. People seem to be seizing on these studies to say "look, punishing crime doesn't work, and since you disagree with this study, you're against science and you don't deserve to be listened to." Honestly, I think the reason there are no studies proving that punishing crime works, is because it's such a brain-dead obvious conclusion that I'd guess nobody ever felt the NEED to make such a study. Society has been punishing crime for thousands of years. We've all changed our behavior to avoid punishment. If you've ever had a pet it should be perfectly obvious that avoiding punishment is an innate behavior baked into every animal and OBVIOUSLY it works to deter bad behavior. It's something as obvious to me as 2+2=4, or water is wet, or the sky is blue. Fortunately there are other cities out there with actual sane leaders. But as long as SF keeps pushing this politically-motivated, head-in-the-sand "compassion not conviction" nonsense their city will continue going to shit.

happytoexplain 4y ago
I tried Googling "does punishing crime work", and I got results about how some studies show it's ineffective, which is true and relevant - this does not imply that we should not punish crime for some definition of "punish", and I don't get any results about how it's "evil", or "yada yada". >I think the reason there are no studies proving that punishing crime works, is because it's such a brain-dead obvious conclusion that I'd guess nobody ever felt the NEED to make such a study. It's pretty easy to imagine how punishment might not have an appreciable effect on certain crimes in certain contexts, so it's confusing to assert that your conclusion is "brain-dead obvious". Punishment as a concept is indeed obvious, but only because it serves as an obvious outlet for our angry emotions, not because it "obviously" works effectively and in all cases. You're injecting really strongly biased/unthoughtful wording into your opinion, which is a needless distraction.
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Der_Einzige 4y ago

If you think SF is bad, come to Portland OR. You guys don't even know how good you have it.

jtms 4y ago
ah Portland, where the young go to retire and live on the sidewalk... lovely place!

legitster 4y ago

San Francisco was a thriving tourist city with a hip downtown close to Silicon Valley and Berkeley. Major venture capitalists set up shop in the city for basically no other reason than they thought it was cool and they wanted to be around other cool VCs (this is based on the impression I got from Ben Horowitz's book). The whole "talent pool" was a self-fulfilling prophecy - there's no reason they couldn't have set up in more business friendly places like San Jose or Sacramento or even Nashville Tennessee for that matter. But it was always a bit of a flex of muscle to be in SF. San Francisco as a city never needed these businesses. But they came anyway. So in most cities you have city planners that work really hard to build a desirable environment for attracting talent and businesses. I think people miss the point of SF's political problems. And until Bob Lee's death, the VC class always had the money to kind of rise above San Francisco's problems and not see it for the dump it was increasingly becoming. It's as frustrating as it is needless - there are a hundred other cities in America better suited for VCs to set up shop in.

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