I had a car broken into this last weekend. They broke into every rental car in the lot (by the ferry building).
A police officer was rolling through, telling people not to leave anything visible in their cars (nothing was visible in mine). I asked him if I could file a report, and he told me I would have to go to the station. He told me he wasn't sticking around and refused to take a report.
I had a similar experience last year with an officer who tried to talk us out of filing a report for a man with a hatchet who had shattered car windows with it, and I had a dispatcher refuse to send an officer for a theft crew that I'd stopped in the middle of breaking into a car before they waved a gun at me and drove at me and my son over the sidewalk.
I've also had them refuse to take reports at our neighborhood station, forcing me to go to the Mission station to file a report.
The police in San Francisco are less than useless. We should fire the whole set and start over.
> telling people not to leave anything visible in their cars
I effing hate that attitude. We shouldn't have to live in a society where every moment you have to be vigilant against the bad guys.
It keeps piling on. I suspect if we keep this up there will be signs "don't use your phone in public" (because people will steal phones from your hands). "don't eat in public" (because people will steal food from you). "don't drive a car" (because your car will be wrecked/stolen). "Don't leave your house" (because outside you're likely to be mugged).
The whole point of having police instead of having to walk around with your own armor and armed guards is so we can not have to put up with this stuff. But nearly everyone, at least on the west, takes it for granted that "it's just the way it is". It's not. It's the way we let it be. Not every place/country has this issue. We let it get there by both by encouraging it ("looking for a partner in crime") and by letting it slide (see police response above)
This isn't just SF. In Berlin I was told not to put my bag between my legs because someone would steal it from behind. In Paris a friend had her wallet stolen from her purse in ~15 seconds. She reached into her purse for her camera, took a picture, looked back into her purse, saw her wallet was gone.
>The whole point of having police instead of having to walk around with your own armor and armed guards is so we can not have to put up with this stuff.
I might catch tuns of downvotes for this, but the Police in SF are to protect the interests of the elite. It is not in their interest to worry about "petty" crime. The police are not legally obligated to protect the public.
> We shouldn't have to live in a society where every moment you have to be vigilant against the bad guys.
> having to walk around with your own armor and armed guards is so we can not have to put up with this stuff
The net result wont be hyper vigilant people (as in they modify their behavior). The net result will be fight or flight. Vigilantes, or migration. I found myself getting increasingly ready for violence in SF. I didn't want that to be my story and I have the self control and self awareness to do something else. So I left, and though it pains me I will probably never live there again. California as a piece of the earth is amazing, but a minority of the people there make it terrible.
Considering violence to protect your property is a fool's errand in CA. The people attempting to steal from you have a very low chance of going to jail. You resorting to violence to stop it has a very, very high chance of you getting significant time in jail. You did the most reasonable thing by leaving.
> I had a dispatcher refuse to send an officer for a theft crew that I'd stopped in the middle of breaking into a car before they waved a gun at me and drove at me and my son over the sidewalk.
That encounter with the thieves sounds awful, and then being unable to get police help sounds doubly awful.
I hope your son wasn't traumatized by it.
FWIW, not all cities are like that. The couple times someone pulled a gun on me on the sidewalk in Cambridge (Mass.), a large number of police cruisers responded, and started a very professional-seeming search. The time that I called police before I got home, after they got a description and then statement from me, one of the officers gave me a ride home. Cambridge isn't as great as it could be for founders (not as much action as the Bay Area, and the bottom-end apartments might be $2K+ and still have peeling lead paint and the occasional mold or rat), but you do get good police.
As a German that sentence sounds so absurd. I am in my mid-30s and have never held a gun myself. The only weapons I saw in Germany were (holstered) guns on policemen.
I think it's not normal in the US to have a gun pulled on you. But maybe not too unusual for a city person to have been mugged at gun or knife point, at least once.
The reason I've been mugged multiple times is that I used to walk many, many more hours late at night in cities than most US people do. (I also discouraged numerous opportunistic mugging approaches, before they happened.)
I've never held a gun. And I'd guess most US coastal city people almost never see guns in person, except like you describe. Despite the impression we get of the US from TV shows and movies, about half the US votes for the political party that says we need more restrictions on guns.
As long as politicians and da are dead set on police not actually convicting anyone you can replace the police as many times as you want. Not that they are good, but they probably don't want to bother charging someone who will be released without a slap on the wrist the next day anyway.
In New Zealand they keep police numbers low deliberately. It keeps "crime rates" low because people stop reporting crimes.
I'd be inclined to blame low numbers of police rather than police apathy. But I haven't actually seen a policeman on the street in my country - outside protests - for at least a decade. The fact that you actually found one outside in the wild is remarkable to me.
I tried to file a report with video evidence from the car 2 years ago. I was never able to get through to anyone at the police who would take the report, just passed to a voicemail and no one ever called back or acknowledged the report.
You can replace the police force, nothing will change. When cops feel unwanted and disrespected they act accordingly. There's a reason we have a history of unwarranted respect for cops and military members. It's not because they always deserve it, but because you want them to feel like they do.
> There's a reason we have a history of unwarranted respect for cops and military members. It's not because they always deserve it, but because you want them to feel like they do.
In other words, either we show them obsequience and respect they don't deserve, or else they'll "act accordingly" and just start robbing and killing people en masse.
That's no better than the mafia. Actually it's worse than the mafia because at least when the mob shakes people down it's illegal.
Nowhere in my comment was there anything about tolerating mafia-like behavior. It's really not complicated. Of course cops should be reprimanded for bad behavior, as they are.
Reprimand means an 'official rebuke'. Police are not reprimanded except for the most egregious cases. People complain, but they aren't held accountable.
> When cops feel unwanted and disrespected they act accordingly.
Strange, when service workers act that way, they either start pretending that they are helpful and respected, or they get fired.
And as for cops, they've been useless for a very long time, certainly prior to the events of the past few years. The tantrum they throw every time they are subjected to any oversight is purely performative.
Majority of the service workers I encounter are royally pissed at the world so I'm not sure that checks out on my end. And it boggles my mind that someone can truly believe "cops are useless". Go found your own society and see how long you last without law enforcement.
No need to replace them, I just want them to actually be legally held to at least the same standards the rest of us are. They routinely get away with assault and perjury, because they are in bed with both oversight bodies and the prosecutors. It's an insane conflict of interest that wouldn't be appropriate for a burger-flipper, let alone someone with a gun and a license to swing it around in people's faces.
I'll also point out that it's a really stupid idea to send an armed gunmen to do, say, a wellness check, but that's a marginal problem, not a root cause.
Yes, that's the sure fire way to reform an organization that's corrupted by the external incentives that it operates in, and that punishes and drives out decent people joining it.
Don't like the homeless camp in the park near you? Have you tried pitching your tent there, and reforming it? Don't like Russia getting truculent? Go there and fix it. Don't like Amazon behaving unethically? Join it as a janitor and fix it from the inside.
Seems reasonable to expect someone to have at least some experience in an area before laying down strong criticisms and suggestions for how it needs to be overhauled. Otherwise, yes, it is a futile, speculative conversation.
Cops have been useless for a long time. It is why everyone currently hates them. They don't work for us. They don't protect us. They extract money from us to justify their existence. Truly useless.
A cop recently rolled into my neighborhood after the hurricane here in Florida while my kids and about 8 other kids were climbing on a fallen tree. He stopped and walked over to check things out, then talked to the kids and gave my 10 year old a coupon to an ice cream shop that said "I was caught doing something cool" and then posed for pictures with all the kids.
The day before that 6 cops with chain saws in full uniform parked in front of my house. They spent several hours cutting up and hauling a fallen tree with my neighbors.
Maybe people should talk more about the good things cops do.
Yes, it's easy for humans to behave in truly heinous ways if you give them the power to inflict violence on you, with next to no accountability counterbalancing it.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines in HN comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we have to eventually ban such accounts.
This is somewhat irrelevant, the police operate like a gang.
There was an entire recall election becuase of "lawlessness" but it turns out that it was not the DA that was the problem, it's the police force refusing to address crime.
Seems pretty likely to be direct corruption organized with the thieves.
Got a $1500 bike stolen from the inside of my locked apartment in Potrero Hill back in 2015 or 16. Was very bitter about that -- it was one of the few things I brought with me to SF. Police ignored it.
For weeks after I was walking through all the homeless chop shops looking for it. About a month after the theft, I received a call from someone who bought a frame (just the frame) with my serial number at a San Jose flea market. Told them to keep it -- at least it's in the hands of someone who cares.
The point of my story is that theft sucks, can happen to anyone, and it takes a toll on our communities. Wish law enforcement took the problem more seriously.
Law enforcement is useless if they pick and choose which laws to enforce. Laws themselves are pointless if they are not enforced (or even worse: selectively enforced)
This is really up to the prosecutors, not the cops. They tell the cops "we are not charging people for doing X," so the cops don't arrest anyone for X. At least in NYC and SF, there are written statements from the DA's office to this effect.
Can you provide a link to these statements? How old are they?
FWIW I don't live in SF but I've had a couple of car break-ins and I don't even remember if I reported them; it was a formality for insurance purposes if so and I never expected nor saw evidence of any police follow up. Are there cities where that's different?
> “Bragg said the office will stop prosecuting people for theft of services, trespassing (unless it accompanies a stalking charge), aggravated unlicensed operation, routine traffic violations not accompanied by felony charges, obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest, and prostitution.“
The Manhattan DA subsequently claimed to roll back the policy, but they are still not interested in prosecuting. I travel to NYC on business regularly, and I’ve seen 6/6 times in the last 8 months people at various stations openly evading Subway fares. In one case, a dude was holding a gate open and yelling at people to come through and not bother paying - with 2 NYPD sitting there talking about 10 feet away.
In my small upstate city, they’ll only even pretend to investigate a burglary. We have issues with people partying (drinking, smoking weed, having sex, eating and dumping trash in the street) in cars in nice neighborhoods. We have muggings, car thefts, robberies, etc like never before. The cops shrug, as their operating orders prevent them from doing anything.
The “progressive” governance model is to suck up to activists to get the campaign cash. Activists want the cops to stand down to street crime. Ultimately the people who live on the wrong side of the tracks suffer. It’s gross.
Nobody has ever cared about this (nor should they, IMO; disclaimer: I have never lived in NYC). Occasionally journalists go to NYC to interview random residents about fare evasion, and the main response is a shrug.
Frankly, we’d all be generally better off with free public transit. Governments end up paying most of the bill anyway, and increasing transit use would be a big benefit to those most needing help.
If you don't crack down on free subway rides, next they'll be taking free books from the libraries, helping themselves to health checkups or worse expecting police to investigate their petty crime reports at no expense.
And who ends up paying for all that? That's right, the taxpayer.
I think you’re trying to make a joke, but it’s hard to tell for sure (Poe's law strikes again). Your comment seems like a parody of those “you wouldn’t steal a car” PSA ads trying to discourage copyright infringement.
In case you are serious... Fare evasion vs. stealing library books are clearly categorically different. Routine health checkups should be free for everyone; the US profit-focused healthcare system is totally fucked up: outrageously expensive for society, outrageously ineffective, and outrageously unjust.
I don’t disagree with you, but the fact is the public transit isn’t free in NYC.
Is fare evasion a thing? Sure. But when prosecutorial discretion decides that public transit is going to be de facto free, that’s a governance failure that undermines confidence in government.
If the DA wanted to be the public face of a movement to transform public transit by eliminating fares, that’s one thing. Saying “we’re not interested in prosecuting theft of services”, that’s not the same.
> Frankly, we’d all be generally better off with free public transit. Governments end up paying most of the bill anyway, and increasing transit use would be a big benefit to those most needing help.
Not for long. If you turn public transit into a de facto homeless shelter people who have other options will avoid it. No country with good public transport has it free.
Luxembourg has fare-free transit nationwide. Estonia’s capital Tallinn (a city of >400k residents) has fare-free public transit. Dozens (maybe hundreds?) of other cities around the world have made transit free. In the US, Kansas City has fare-free streetcars and bus system, and many other cities are starting experiments with fare-free transit. Generally residents and city officials are happy with the results.
That’s a different city (where I live) In my city, the city administration has instructed police not to pursue certain offenses. The DA in my county has to please suburban voters as well, so he projects a little tougher.
Typically, it’s difficult to prosecute things like muggings or car theft.
So using lesser acts that are easily demonstrated is a more scalable process. If you’re in my garage, charging you with trespass and petit larceny will get plead out as trespass. If you have to go to trial for the theft, you need to establish that the property was there, etc. That means witnesses, testimony, etc.
These issues are nuanced. I don’t want to see my neighbors abused by out of control police. But letting criminals run wild isn as bad as letting police run around without accountability. Conservative politicians used to bleat about “the rule of law”. Law requires justice, and that means police and prosecutors must be held to a high standard of conduct and competence.
The fact I learned about NYC fare evasion yesterday is that Andrew Cuomo's crackdown on fare evasion in 2019 cost more in police officer pay than was ever lost in fares. Not just more than was recovered by cracking down, literally more than was ever lost.
That’s about bizarre NY political circus, not fare evasion or enforcement. DA’s don’t give a shit about city budgets - they don’t work for the city or state.
MTA is a public authority with a board controlled by the governor - the mayor of NYC has limited influence over the subways and bridges, but the NYPD (formerly transit police) are the main enforcement. There was an infamous rivalry between the two officials and sending in state police, etc was part of the show.
"But cops also do not get to decide what they investigate based on their own beliefs and biases."
Actually they do. It's called law enforcement discretion. They could watch you get murdered and have no legal responsibility to help you (they would likely be fired, but that's about it).
Nah. If you get to pick and choose you are no longer law enforcement. I get prioritization and I get that there are nuances and circumstances but if I break the law and nothing happens and another person breaks the law and they get in trouble, in the same setting, at the same time it's bullshit.
Also, cops are not paid to make their own rules or decide which laws are good or bad. We have this entire branch that is responsible for creating/updating/deleting laws.
Cops are people. How well would you try to do your job after a few months of seeing your boss purposefully undo whatever work you did at the end of every day. How long would you keep actually coding if your boss just deleted all of your code every shift with no acknowledgment.
If my code was mostly harassing and extorting minorities and the the poor then I'd be glad my boss was deleting it and asking me to stop writing more of it.
What kind of sociopath would get job satisfaction from felony marijuana busts or harassing queer people trying to have a drink at a bar when you could be going after bigger fish?
Maybe the effective Altruism folk can do a law enforcement spin-off to grade the impact of different enforcement strategies in a way that more people would understand.
So stopping bike thefts is harrasing minorities now, or are you on a tangent Noone was talking about? The conversation was about why cops in these areas don't bother investigating crimes and mugging, I would hope you don't think enforcing those laws is racist. If it is, I guess we should just be mad max or something. I agree cops in this country need serious reform, but that's not what this discussion is about.
As a cyclist myself, one of the reasons I don't support laws about cycle helmets is that police regularly use them (as they do many other laws) to harass people on the basis of race, wealth or other biases via inconsistent enforcement.
And that's a law, that in theory, I might be convinced had some merit. Not some War on Drugs BS.
How can you exist in the year 2022, have strong opinions on law and order on the internet and feel deep sympathy with police officers forced to do a thankless task as public servants and yet be blissfully unaware of this entire concept?
I feel like we're not reading the same thread here. Cops going after minorities is a bad thing. But handcuffing the cops so badly that they have no interest in going after organized serial theft rings because they know that no charges will stick is just as much of a problem in the other direction. Unless you think it's fine to live in a place with 0 personal property protection there's obviously a middle ground that should be met here. But whatever, I don't live there, and would move if my local police got that disfunctional, so I'm happy for the people who enjoy living there. May your bikes stay in your possession for at least a year or two, I guess.
Something I didn't spell out, which may explain some of your confusion, there is such a thing as "drug related theft crimes", these are crimes committed by drug addicts to feed their habit.
They have a distinct pattern, and most of the crimes mentioned in this thread fit that pattern. So, if you try to be "tough on crime" by locking up people with addictions rather than helping them break their addiction and/or even just in some scenarios giving them drugs for free, then you are wasting both lives and money.
> Another dimension of drug-related crime is whether the
offense is committed to obtain money (or goods to sell to
get money) to support drug use. According to BJS
national surveys, the most comprehensive information
available, an estimated 17% of 1991 State prison inmates
and 13% of convicted jail inmates in 1989 reported
committing their offenses to get money to buy drugs
(table␣3). Offenders convicted of robbery, burglary, and
larceny/theft were most likely to commit their offense to
obtain money to buy drugs. Offenders convicted of sexual
assault and homicide were among the offenders least
likely to commit the offense to sustain their drug habit.
I'm suggesting that we should listen to experts, and get the former group medical help, which frees up police time and resources to go after the second group of murderers and rapists, which helps the idea appeal to the tough on crime types even if it has the drawbacks of being more humane, more effective and cheaper as well as actually reducing crime.
But the War on Drugs was never really about the drugs in the first place, so it's not like this was some innocent mistake, it's a problem that got created and is now exploited to push more of the same bad policies.
Cops have the unfortunate position of having to police where the crime is. We have the means to just place a button on a screen. The hackers trying to get in and steal is of no consequence to a programmer.
If in some wierdo universe where programmers had to stop hackers by busting down their door in the middle of the night to stop a hack, maybe programmers would be facing the same scrutiny.
Public: You're going after too many minorities!!!
You: I'm just trying to stop the hackers!!!!
Public: Defund the programmers!
You: Look we stopped 40 white hackers last month! We'll stop going after the others, we promise.
But they do get to decide what they investigate based on the DA's polices. It's a waste of everyone's time to investigate crimes that won't be charged regardless of evidence.
The city affirmatively decided to decriminalize petty crime. Why would you blame the cops for that.
Imho this is about priorities not deciding to not enforce the law. If the cops have nothing to do and a law is broken they should invetigate. They don't get to sit on their buts complaining about the da
I'm guessing that if a rich, white or Asian tech worker decided to loot a Walgreens, they would get the book thrown at them. Look at the small business owners in New York who get arrested and charged with everything possible by the DA's office for defending themselves (until public pressure forces them to back down). That's where we are. This is what the people voted for, though.
This is total nonsense. Wealthy professionals regularly get away with much more egregious thefts than petty shoplifting, the police do a lot more harassment of poor people than rich people, and lack of response to shoplifting is not about race.
Resources, risk v reward. Unless you go with something like broken window theory and wish to use shoplifting to ultimately deter more serious crimes, it's not worth enforcing via government action.
If you want to know where shop lifting is taken seriously, it's Walmart. If you steal from Walmart, they know it, they know who you are and it goes in your file. They will bust you at a felony amount level with all the evidence documented and wait until you are somewhere in a jurisdiction they know will prosecute. They will trespass you and have their LPs hold you and the off duty cop they employ transport you.
I'd say it's pretty serious when it's to the point that places are going our of business because of it. Any business can expect some shrinkage, but when that number surpasses rhe already low margins in most industries...
What thefts do software engineers regularly get away with? I've never heard of a software engineer committing wage theft, for example.
I'm not saying that police should hassle someone for sleeping on the street. I'm saying they should arrest people for stealing stuff. That's not harassment. That's justice.
I do know what wage theft is, and I am well aware that software engineers aren't generally in a position to do it. The people who commit most of the wage theft are small business owners (who have employees to steal wages from), who are usually poorer than software engineers.
Wage theft is the go-to example of people who say "shoplifting doesn't hold a candle to the thefts the rich do," so I was preempting that argument.
I mean... Are you saying that there is social inequality?
There is a risk/reward analysis that should go into the decision to loot a Walgreens. If you have nothing to lose or are desperate you're more likely to give 0 fucks and the system just has to deal with you.
I'm saying that the way we run society tilts that risk/reward payoff absurdly in favor of reward for a certain class of people by eliminating their risk. That is, by definition, unjust.
Why would they loot a Walgreens when they could loot the payroll? Wage theft is the most common form of theft[1] in the country and it's almost completely unenforced.
Real payroll doesn't work like in Andor, or the old American West. :) You have to be in a position to personally profit by convincing your employees to underreport their time.
Make no mistake, tech workers are rich. Many small business owners (who do commit lots of wage theft) have fewer assets and lower incomes. Also, tech workers don't commit very many crimes.
The rampant organized bike theft is particularly obnoxious not only is the theft disproportionately impactful relative to the value since you needed the bike for transportation-- but it's particularly easy to do something about it because its so organized and large scale: Put out bait bikes with trackers and/or surveillance.
(and plus, when you bust a big operation and now have a ton of bikes whos owners can't be located you now have an endless supply of bait)
Um... no? Entrapment is about being induced to commit a crime you wouldn't otherwise have committed, and it's a lot more relevant for things like drugs or terrorist plots where the government information is outright giving you the things that's illegal for you to have.
For theft, it's quite hard to think of a situation where someone could put you in a state of mind that stealing this thing isn't against the law. The closest I can come is a signed statement by the police department saying "it's not against the law to steal this," and that's more because some jurisdictions will give you the defense if the government lies to you about the law. (And I suspect it still wouldn't qualify because it isn't exactly reasonable to believe that theft could be legal.)
I think example of entrapment for theft is "I'll pay you $10000 for it if you steal that bike for me". ... you wouldn't have normally considered it but now that I stuck a huge windfall under your nose ...
Putting a bike a place and manner an ordinary tourist would, which you just happen to be monitoring is not going to cause someone to steal who otherwise wouldn't.
Really? I though entrapment is more like going under cover saying stuff like "hey wanna help me steal a bike!" "ahhh don't be a chicken!" to someone who wasn't planning to.
I think the police consider single-family houses more a priority for "home invasion" than apartments. Even if the apartment dweller is a professional, apartments are for "the poors" in the police mentality. At least in my experience from a burglary.
Cops really don't give a shit about property crimes that happen to people they don't think matter. They aren't there to protect your stuff, they exist so the Walmarts of the world don't have to spend even more money on security.
Cops know they'll get 50%+ of muncipal budgets whether they stop petty crime or not.
The most important function cops serve is enforcing property restrictions. Someone might be able to walk out with $10 of items from a shelf, but they certainly aren't able to seize the business and do what they want with it. That's how SWAT teams show up and shoot you. I doubt Walmart wants to invest in a standing army, tanks, automatic weapons, seige weapons, etc.
They broke down the door (and destroyed the glass in the process) to get it. The police took the report, gave me a piece of paper, and I've never heard from them since.
That is not remotely my experience. Someone made a similar comment a few weeks ago and related an experience where their car was stolen and the police refused to initiate a pursuit, which lead to a whole thread about whether it was some kind of new woke policing not to do high speed chases in dense urban areas (spoiler: no). I am more concerned about CPD going nuts if I call them than I am about them blowing me off.
Reading this headline I thought to myself, this can't be possible. But then I remembered I got two packages stolen in two different neighborhood of the city, and during NYE someone broke the door of the backyard to probably see what they could steal there.
> Reading this headline I thought to myself, this can't be possible. But then I remembered
It's funny, this is exactly what happens when I talk to my SF friends about crime. They have an immediate defensive reaction to insist it's not that bad, but then they slowly start recalling various crime experiences they've had in the past year. It's as if the constant background level of crime has reset their expectations of what's bad and what's normal.
Isn't part of that the forced-positive culture of California? Combined with perhaps a dose of worry that complaining about crime might identify you with the wrong political party?
My response was "only half?". Seriously, isn't this true everywhere? I've jad things stolen in small towns and in big cities that are "tough on crime" and have citizens that vote for that. Theft is just part of life right? If I've just lived in bad places, where would one suggest that most people don't experience theft?
No, it's not true everywhere. Where I live people don't lock their doors and leave their keys in the ignition. I'm not hyperbolizing, that's the literal truth.
The distinction is that this isn't just a small town, it's a town with a strong community and it's just out of the way enough to be unappealing to transients.
Have lived in LA, Santa Cruz, SJ, SF, DC, New York and PA. SF is the only city where I have had my car broken into and all of my things stolen. Told the police I found literally at the Starbucks two parking spots away from my car and they legit declined to look into it.
I live in Washington, DC, in a quiet neighborhood. The most frequent victims of theft are not residents, but workers: maids, contractors, landscape crews, almost invariably from cars or trucks. The police do show up and take reports, but I don't know how often anyone is arrested.
In Denver, when I worked for a neighborhood paper briefly ca. 1980, one of my jobs was to check the blotter at the local precinct. I discovered that the Denver police kept two lists: one for burglaries, one for all else. My recollection is that there were usually a dozen or so burglaries each week.
> Seriously, isn't this true everywhere? I've jad things stolen in small towns and in big cities
This is baffling to me. I'm currently in a medium sized city. When someone in my social circle has something stolen, it's a big deal. The last time it happened was several years back, and it upset the person enough that they moved to a new neighborhood as soon as possible.
It's so weird to read these accounts from people who think constant theft and crime are just normal.
Living in low crime areas can be quite a shock. I grew up in a area where my bike was stolen out of our shed a few times. I'm in an area now where children leave their bikes on the front lawn and sidewalk overnight. It's a completely different world. I hope you get a chance to move somewhere without the acceptance of random theft some day.
> where would one suggest that most people don't experience theft?
I live in Germany. The only time I ever had something stolen was at age 9, by a classmate who was shortly thereafter diagnosed as a cleptomaniac and who received therapy to deal with it.
Generally speaking, thefts do happen here, too. But if theft is of particular concern for you, it's not all that hard to significantly reduce your chances. Pick an apartment that's not on the ground floor, so people cannot get in through the windows. Put your wallet in a pocket that can be closed with a zipper, and pickpockets won't bother with you. Armed robberies are just not a thing because of gun control laws. Sure, there are a few ones across the entire country every year, but it's rare enough to make the news every time.
FWIW, I never experienced any theft when living in Switzerland, Germany, or Pittsburgh, and only one minor theft while living in San Diego (a nice pair of garden clippers).
This is how crime stats "not increasing" end up happening, because we don't report it since it's a waste of time. I'm not blaming you, I don't report 100% of the incidents I deal with in the inner-city of Seattle (something happens every quarter without fail), but unfortunately it depresses the actual crime rates that are occurring every day.
I thought the opposite. How can this not be at least a nationwide, if not worldwide reality? I live in the suburbs of Northern Utah. I’ve had bikes stolen from my yard, items stolen from my truck, money stolen from my wife’s purse, and those are just the one’s I can think of. We probably create millions of little opportunities in our lifetimes. A phone left unattended for a moment, neglecting to lock your car, leaving a bag while you use a restroom, not locking windows, you get the idea.
> How can this not be at least a nationwide, if not worldwide reality?
It is certainly not worldwide. Take Japan for instance. Your stuff[0] left in the open will almost never be taken. And in the event they went missing, there's a good chance it's because someone took them to the nearest police box.
[0] Umbrellas on rainy days are notable exceptions. But they're so cheap (a few dollars) many consider them "communal" items.
There's also kind of an unspoken rule among the people here: if something is left on the road where it might be spoiled or destroyed, (and is not valuable of course), things are moved to the sidewalk so the owner can find them easily and/or are not destroyed by careless passers-by. I have seen a handkerchief that was tied to the railing at eye-level, so that the owner could find it easily when they came back to look for it.
If the thing in question is valuable (like wallets, cellphones), it will most likely be deposited to the nearest police box where they will hold on to it for a while.
I've lived in a community where none of us lock our doors, bikes in the porch or driveway, and nothing gets stolen. That said, every city I've lived in, I've kept my doors locked and my belongings inside. I'm not sure what's wrong with our society that we feel like we need to take every precaution possible to avoid theft.
As someone that's never been a victim of theft, that's wild and I feel like it would just ruin things for quite awhile.
I had what I assume was a drunk person, try to get into my apartment once. Not something that should be too scary but I felt uneasy for some time after that.
I'd be out wiring the house like ft. knox the next day, if that happened to me haha.
Without doxing yourself can you give a general idea where this place is? Do you know lots of people that have experienced theft and you are just lucky, or is it unusual? I don't think I even know anyone who hasn't had packages stolen or a car broken into or stuff taken from their yard at least. One guy where I used to live went in to get some water while mowing his front yard and came back as people drove away with his lawnmower in the bed of their truck. I think he got that one back and they got the theives.
I have family in New England and this seems pretty accurate. Still lock doors tho :)
But its small enough that there's only a few "big" crimes a year which becomes the town gossip. This mostly involves some superintendent embezzling money or some criminals coming into town to steal catalytic converters lol
I've lived in NYC, SF, RDU, Hartford and New Haven (CT), all places that the news would paint as practically ruled by crime, but I've never experienced theft. I lock my doors and keep my car clean and that's been enough.
Despite all the stories in this thread, me and my neighbors here in SF leave our cars out and haven't hade break ins. Even the $100,000 convertible with a soft top parked outside our place most nights hasn't been bothered in the year I've lived here, and I live in NOPA, so not exactly the outskirts.
I think the saying "crime doesn't travel up hill" is very real in SF
Since folks are sharing stories.. I lived in the Mission for about 10 years (2003-2012).
My apartment was broken into, my car was broken into multiple times, my roommate was mugged at knifepoint and stabbed (she was fine), my bike was stripped for parts (they stole the handlebars / shifters and seat while it was locked up), and my car was stolen, driven around the neighborhood in broad daylight when I spotted it at 19th and South Van Ness and tried to steal it back and was almost run over, and then it was disposed of in Hunter’s Point completely stripped and wrecked (no passenger seat, interior panels, stick shift, battery or wheels).
Amusingly though I moved to NYC because of boredom, a bad breakup and the abysmal dating prospects, not the constant crime.
It really is bad, right, and not my imagination? I feel like I’ve wasted a decade of my life here on an endless string of bad first dates with no mutual attraction.
It wasn’t like that in other places I’ve lived. I mentioned this to a family member recently, and they said it’s harder because I’m getting older. That’s probably true, but I swear it’s rough in this city.
It’s a bit like buying a house here: you spend a huge amount of time, effort, and money, and end up with less than you’d get back home.
> I feel like I’ve wasted a decade of my life here on an endless string of bad first dates with no mutual attraction.
This was a top3 for leaving. I realized that in the same way my politics are not welcome in the company I work for, so I just disengaged, the politics of SF made me an unwelcome, unwanted form of "diversity". So I left, along with all my tax burden, cultural contributions, and normally positive nature.
I found I had to put in more work to get similar results, from a place that was known to be 'easy' (in hindsight) to a place known to be hard. I found someone in about a year, and although they might not be 'the best', I do love them a lot and we have been together for a long time. Sometimes I wonder if I should've kept on dating sometimes although.
The pursuit of the "the best" is one of the most toxic parts of Bay area culture. In want of the "the best" I've seen people double/triple book themselves for events so they can flake on 2 and go to the one they want in the moment. I've seen people endlessly date, permanently unsatisfied with every human they encounter (if you can have 100 dates in 2 yrs and no one lives up to your standards, high probability thats more about you than them). In pursuit of "the best" people undermine eachother at work, and fail to keep their words. On and on it goes.
Wow that's something. And I thought I had the best story for getting my roof rack stolen from off my car.
It wasn't particularly bitter – just, wtf. Bitter was when I was bedridden because of a flu, and when I finally had energy to go out to get some food, my bike got stolen in the 10 minutes I was in the grocery store. It was a miserable trip back home.
License plate got stolen from my car. Didn't touch the car otherwise. It didn't fall off because the front one was also missing. Immediately went to the police dept which took almost half a day to file a report. Utterly dysfunctional. Then a week's worth of crap from DMV to get a new license plate.
I still have nightmares about the time I woke up on a Saturday morning to the sounds of a disturbed and dying woman screaming after she doused herself in gasoline and lit herself on fire at Dorland and Guerrero.
Some of the screams were from people who had tried to help her and ended up injuring themselves.
When I was a (fairly reckless) teenager, I got into a fight and got "stabbed" in my side (minor wound). Honestly, it's not something I consider as traumatic.
It _was_ an effective way to stop the fight though.
I have dogs and love dogs. Play really rough with mine, let her chew on me. I got bit (tooth punctured, not just scratched) by a small white dog. It made me nervous around small dogs for a solid year.
The weirdest thing I noticed moving to the bay area wasn't SF (have been there a couple times and only saw a little bit of the craziness), it was how different South Bay/Peninsula are from the city
I expected the same SF problems you hear about to be issues in that area, and they really aren't (at least where I live)
Idk if I would ever move into the city tbh, it just seems like a shithole. I'm sure it's less boring, but I like not having to deal with theft or BS politics
I remember asking someone from the area at my job orientation if I should live in SF, and they pretty much said "no it's a literal shithole it isn't worth it" and it was such candid advice I took it
Also another weird thing is I expected all the locals around here to be super progressive, but a lot of the people I've talked to were pissed off about what's happened to SF
Also a question for people who know the bay area: where do you guys recommend to live for both commute and safety?
Come to downtown San Jose and you will see a lot of the same issues. It has a lot to do with scale. The peninsula Nimbys have successfully kept any scale from being realized there. We have rampant theft, breakins, unsolved shootings and stabbings, shit and piss needing to be regularly cleaned from the sidewalks. We have few sideshows luckily but plenty of streets lined with ppl strung out on drugs and no prospects.
It's an american disease, maybe even californian. Go to many other cities in the rest of the world and they have denser, better cities with none of the literal shit. IMO I would barely call most of the bay a city, just a semi-dense suburb for the most part beyond a few pockets.
There are very specific criminal justice reform and soft-on-crime policies that lead to this. If you go to Tokyo, you'll be put in jail for doing drugs. Most likely extremely tough prison sentence of a decade or more. It prevents people from doing drugs and getting trapped in the spiraling destruction of self. Here in America, we have NYC and SF opening clinics to comfortably allow people to shoot heroine in the comfort of a shelter: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/nyregion/supervised-injec...
Moral underlying reason? We don't want people to overdose. We're saving lives.
I'd say, Tokyo's policies are far more moral. They'd save thousands of lives vs. 2 overdose lives in a reactionary measure.
There’s a famous Bay Area town with no police dept, sizable population, somewhat wealthy, very low murder rate, amazing schools and no homelessness, and neither democrats or republicans have any meaning in local town politics. The nearby towns are similar. I wonder if it's possible to buy this in any other part of the country.
Probably Bentonville, Arkansas, I’m kidding mostly bc I don’t know if they have a police department but it’s sorta the same idea as Cupertino. Also I think Santa Clara fire fights and polices for them.
The US has the world's highest incarceration rate (and by some distance--it's about 10% higher than the second highest rate, El Salvador, and 300% higher than the highest rate among the EU countries), and Japan is around the 20th lowest.
This strongly suggests that incarceral policies are not the most effective solution to reducing crime.
Yea, we've been telling ourselves this and let's do more of the same for another 2 decades and completely destroy the fabric of society.
Put it the other way, if crime rates would increase hypothetically in Japan, you'd see a proportinal increase in incarcination rate. May be, that there are cultural differences and the crime rates are vastly different between Japan and USA. Disincitivization from hard-on-crime policies could be a non-linear function that we're just glossing over. Highly functional at low crime rates.
But the answer shouldn't be to throw the baby with the bath water and turn public parks into heroine shooting sites. Progressives have been doing this consistently, destroying our nation for last 3 decades of lies and misunderstandings of criminal justice system. Experiments like CHOP and CHAZ, which abandon all law & order are the epitome of the progressive dysfunction.
Sounds like propaganda more than reality but regardless, Japan is a de facto ethno-state and that has certain peculiarities that make it a poor example to contrast with the United States. In comparing to Japan, the United States of course also has a history of slavery in its carceral system is not particularly humanitarian.
Effect size is a thing. The US incarceration rate is >3× comparable countries. If the effect size of incarceration rate were similar to (or larger than!) other causes, the US would have to be consistently 3× comparables in other social statistics, like GDP per capita, inequality, or diversity, to achieve the same crime rate. But it's not, which means that the other factors must have greater impact on the crime rate than incarceration rate. Ergo, locking people up is not the most effective solution--there has to be something more effective out there.
Eh, I don't think it's so causal. In my mind it's the culture that keeps crime low and the laws have merely been created to reflect the values of that culture.
It’s a totally rational response that is also horribly selfish. You kind of see this sentiment any time discussion of San Francisco comes up. A bunch of people who have voted to consistently take funds out of the city will jump to attack it as if it were some hated foreign country. Meanwhile the voters of California restricted local taxation to be massively regressive. The voters or America consistently give handouts to rural places. But when it comes to pitching in and helping a once great city, people would rather sit smug about how smart they are to have expelled their homeless people somewhere else.
The problem is not lack of money. There is plenty of money and it's being wasted. The root of the problem is the political views of the people who run the city and the voters who put them there.
Almost everyone I know who drove from Peninsula 10-15 years ago into city had stories about smash and grabs in the city, but nowadays my Nextdoor on the Peninsula (Mountain View/Los Altos) the top three stories are suspicious person walking around the neighborhood, someone getting their catalytic converter stolen, someone getting everything taken from their car locked or unlocked. It could just be the algorithm driving these stories to the top, though. I have had my unlocked car rifled through multiple times. I lived inside the loop in Houston for five years in the 1990s and had my car broken into multiple times as well (even inside apartment complex gated garage) so it's just an easy crime to commit and multiple targets in very small area in urban places.
> I have had my unlocked car rifled through multiple times. I lived inside the loop in Houston for five years in the 1990s and had my car broken into multiple times as well (even inside apartment complex gated garage) so it's just an easy crime to commit and multiple targets in very small area in urban places.
Where I'm from this is pretty much unheard of. It's yet to happen to me in bay area, but also my car isn't super nice and I never leave anything in it. Hoping it doesn't happen
FWIW my car's been broken into 4 times over the last 2 years in oakland! Hasn't happened since I started leaving the rear seats down, but probably just a matter of time.
During that time, I was asked if I wanted to buy drugs 5 times, I shook a suspicious-looking tail (someone/multiple people following you) twice, and I had a bottle full of blood thrown at my head because I refused to acknowledge a screaming crackhead when I walked past them on the street.
I, a relatively solid 200LB male, was attacked twice in 8 years. I could hold my own fist to fist, but who knows what weapon they brought to the party? I cant imagine how terrifying the city must be for dainty females.
Does being screamed at by a homeless person that they're going to murder you count as being threatened? Actual question... I didn't really think they were seriously going to try to murder me (particularly since these were usually either when I was walking my large dog or in the very crowded FiDi).
Had a homeless guy sit behind me on the bart repeatedly saying he'd slice my neck if I turned around or moved at all. It was a mostly-empty car, and it seemed like he was serious and that nobody else was going to do anything. Wound up sitting still and bolting out at the next stop. Tried calling the cops after and they didn't care in the slightest. Just one of many incidents.
I live in Cambridge, MA now, and it's a million times better. Only thing remotely close that I've seen was one time biking past the Woods-Mullen Shelter in Boston (saw two other comments here call it "Mass and Cass"), except it's just one block and extremely tame compared to what you find all over the Mission, SOMA, and Tenderloin.
Probably 3-4 times a year being screamed at. Not all threats of violence, sometimes just strings of profanity. One woman called my dog a fa**. Though she did also say she'd kill me.
Also called the cops twice on people shooting up in front of the middle school near my house in the morning while I was walking my dog. That wasn't even in the TL - that was Nob Hill.
Some a-hole jumped my fence a couple days ago and stole the package waiting on my stoop. It was miso paste. All I wanted was some homemade miso soup since it's getting cold out.
Been here since 2007 and seriously getting fed up with this shit.
I'm just going to chime here with another anecdata: I've lived in London, Paris, Toronto, Melbourne, New York City, and San Francisco. The two times I've had things stolen (computer, bike) were in the Bay Area lol
I was in San Francisco last week for work. A homeless guy show me his d1ck. Another homeless guy in a wheelchair smoked crack in plain view, on the corner of Ellis and Stockton. And finally another homeless guy was screaming at the elderly Chinese ladies doing tai chi in Washington Square Park. This was just a walk from my hotel to Pier 39.
With all that said, San Francisco is a beautiful city.
Every country, city is beautiful from one way or other. But, it is the people, good governance, good policing , society and culture etc. that ultimately makes city or country good.
It only takes minority number of people to damage reputations of country, and the source of problem must be kept in check. And, I am really sad to hear that the beautiful San Fransico have been plagued by such a people. And, it seems government is doing nothing to ameliorate the situations.
What is the rate for other big cities? Is this a lot higher than usual, or only a little higher?
The thing is that people steal things everywhere. Bikes. Cigarette lighters. Money left out. Scam items off Amazon or eBay is a form of theft. Your beer at parties. Lawn gnomes.
I don’t know many people anywhere who haven’t had something stolen from them at some point, so I’m not sure what this is saying
Walking around (nearly any part of) San Francisco day or night with a toddler is no problem at all, but don’t leave a backpack sitting on your car’s passenger seat if you don’t want your window smashed. The problem is property crimes not violent crime. One of the main issues is that the SF police are unwilling to lift a finger about nearly anything, and more or less laugh at you if you ask for their help.
> SF police are unwilling to lift a finger about nearly anything, and more or less laugh at you if you ask for their help
That's rather uncharitable given the sheer volume of property crime facing the city. Literally hundreds of calls a day... while in 2020 the mayor bragged about cutting the police funding by $120 million and moving it to other organizations. It has since been restored (I think?).
> One of the main issues is that the SF police are unwilling to lift a finger about nearly anything.
Isn’t this a direct effect of the DA refusing to prosecute? What’s the point of police getting involved if the crime isn’t even considered a crime by the prosecutor?
In my opinion blaming the DA was always a lazy excuse. Now that he has been recalled in favor of a “tough” replacement who fired all of the progressive city prosecutors, how do you explain their continuing non-responsiveness?
Recently my plumber neighbors had their truck stolen with their tools in it and told the police precisely where it was but the police wouldn’t do anything, so my neighbors found the thief and beat him up. The police came to ask why there was a fist fight in the middle of the sidewalk. The thief ran away, so the police shrugged and left.
There has not been and I do not believe there will be any appreciable change in police behavior any time in the foreseeable future, without a much more significant reform effort. They’ve been unresponsive to property crime for many years. They started blaming Boudin for their unresponsiveness before he was even elected, and they’ll still be blaming him for their unresponsiveness long into the future.
>Recently my plumber neighbors had their truck stolen with their tools in it and told the police precisely where it was but the police wouldn’t do anything, so my neighbors found the thief and beat him up. The police came to ask why there was a fist fight in the middle of the sidewalk. The thief ran away, so the police shrugged and left.
How much of this is a consequence of prosecutors and judges who don't jail thieves or people who commit assaults? I'm not fan of the police, but what is the point of arresting people and giving them a ride to the police station only to be released back onto the street?
Boston has a higher murder rate and overall violent crime rate than San Francisco, as do most large cities.
San Francisco's problem is rampant property crime: Property crime is still real crime and harms people mentally... but it also means SF is physically safer than many cities that have less overall crime rates, because of their higher violent crime rates.
Since it's often beneficial to an agenda to conflate the two so you'll always see something like:
"San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime"
But some of the cities along the northern part of Orange Line might have more crime than West Roxbury, Roslindale, or Beacon Hill. It’s always going to be somewhat arbitrary
Their highest rate is Spokane, WA at 5,408/100k, which would mean at most 5.4% of people report a theft. SF is a close second at about 5%.
Curious, let's look at the poll sourced by the article. It was a questionnaire of about 1500 people conducted online or by telephone. But there's no link to a paper, and they don't clarify how the online poll was conducted.
Not every victim will file a police report, but it's usually required for insurance payouts, and an order of magnitude difference is hard to swallow. They might have some sampling bias in favor of people who wanted to be interviewed about the state of the city.
Lots of comments in this thread are saying that San Francisco police have repeatedly refused to take police reports. If the police won't take police reports, it artificially makes crime look lower.
I live in Seattle and I don’t think I personally know anyone here who hasn’t had something of theirs stolen. Mostly cars broken into, bikes stolen, things stolen out of their yard.
I would rather prefer the Elder Scrolls version of the Thieves Guild, which places importance on not harming your targets or other members of the guild, as well as emphasizing the need for stealth and skill over violence.
Robbery is pretty rare most places but theft writ large is much more common: stolen bikes, stolen packages, rifling through open cars and/or breaking windows to take things from inside, things like that. My understanding is that San Francisco's crime problem has been mostly those property crimes rather than violent crime like robbery.
I know this is Seattle now but purely time-based: I visited SF for an hour last year and was victim of a smash and grab. Parked across the street across from a restaurant near the wharf with people sitting/eating outside so I thought it would be safe. I'm guessing partly because there were some plastic shopping bags in the backseat (with candy, which they didn't take) and because the rental car had out of state plates. When I returned the car at SF airport, there was a row of cars in front with the exact same window (rear driver's side) smashed. As I waited for paperwork/replacement, several other cars came in with the same window smashed. At least when I called the PD they told me to just file a report online (which I needed for insurance) and asked if they should send an officer - to which I said, "no, why would you send an officer now?". I don't remember the answer. Worse was trying to get a hold of someone at the rental car company... ugh what a disaster.
I was in Seattle for 5 days and had my $8500 mountain bike stolen from within my car (they broke a window to get in), parked in the lot of a 4 Points Sheraton.
Here's a good place to compare to other cities, if comparing is even a reasonable thing to do [1]. Sort by Total for Property Crime. Notably Albuquerque, Spokane, and Memphis have higher total property crime rates. But perhaps wouldn't make such an interesting headline for those in tech.
Also notable that Orlando, FL is high on the list. But Irvine, CA and Tampa, FL are at the bottom of the list.
Please also read the Criticisms sections before jumping to conclusions when making comparisons.
It’s owned entirely by one of the largest (maybe the largest) real estate company in the US, The Irvine Company. They also have a heavy presence in Sunnyvale CA.
Irvine buildings and neighborhoods - all of them - are built intentionally to be anti-crime. Things like alleys and dark corners are virtually non-existent.
I can only point out anecdotally that the people I know in SF who've had their cars broken into don't even bother waiting to report it to the police because they know there's nothing to be done.
I had three or four while I was there, can't remember. Two thefts from our locked garage. Never seriously considered reporting it, but I should have just to make the stats more accurate
I've lived in Albuquerque and even the worst, absolute worst part of Albuquerque, the part of town the locals call "the war zone", was cleaner and safer-feeling than a huge chunk of SF.
My truck did get broken into, though... guy couldn't figure out how to disconnect the 2m radio, though, so he settled for the owner's manual and nothing else.
I guess the shocking part is that you have all of this theft and crime and grit, all happening around people making hundreds of thousands a year living in multi million dollar houses. Go look at the tax revenue of San Francisco vs Albuquerque. It's unacceptable for a city so rich to have such a dismal quality of life.
There are many, many cities with much lower crime and much higher Gini coefficients than SF. Suggesting the crime problem we're discussing is the cause of income inequality is almost deliberately misleading.
> There are many, many cities with much lower crime and much higher
Do you mean cities with lower arrest rates? I don't know of any reliable source that shows actual crime rates.
> Suggesting the crime problem we're discussing is the cause of income inequality
We already know that income inequality causes higher crime. So it's almost certainly a factor. If anyone has sources to evidence for other factors, there's no reason to not be open to that evidence as well.
I mean this could also just be a list of how honest particular police departments are at reporting (or classifying) property crime. Not necessarily the actual rates.
Without comparing to other high density cities for basic theft, I don't really find this that useful. :(
To wit, in Seattle we had our car broken into once. We also had a habit of forgetting the car keys /on top of the car/, such that we would have said we live in a very very safe place. Despite the time the car was broken into.
When I lived in Atlanta, the general practice was not to lock your car, so that they wouldn't have to break in to it.
I mean, yeah? But if the majority of the problem is porch theft, you have a lot different of a reaction compared to if the majority of it is armed robbery. (Or, really, personal robbery period.)
My point is, as someone that doesn't live in San Fran, I don't know how this compares. Is it actually high? Or, is half actually low for comparable density locations.
Back when I was in a low population area, but lived in duplexes, I had my apartment broken into. And way more petty theft than now that I live where I do. Yet, I don't know that I would expect crime is higher there.
people consider a lot of different factors when choosing a place to live. crime rate is an important factor, but it's not the only one.
reading that some other city has X armed robberies per capita doesn't give a great sense of how that would actually impact my day-to-day life. obviously I'd like X to be as low as possible, but if it's already lower than where I currently live and the place has other positive qualities, I would consider moving there.
I live in Boston, which is a similar size and population to SF, and it's extremely safe. There is some crime but even something minor like porch pirates are pretty much not a thing. There is a skid row named "Mass and Cass" which has had HBO documentaries made about it, but there are a lot of protests from citizens advocating to clean it up.
At some point you need the police to arrest all these people and throw them in jail. Even a few weeks behind bars can drastically improve behavior among a population used to zero consequences for theft and violence.
Been in Boston for 15 years. Never had a problem. I've crossed the city many times at 2am walking drunk from a bar, nothing. Not even a single package theft in 15 years.
As a male, I've done the same in Atlanta and in Seattle. In Atlanta, was so late coming home that the transit was closed and I walked 7ish miles to get home. Through downtown.
I still don't claim it is a safer city than Seattle. Not by a long shot. Just as I don't recommend walking downtown Seattle super late. Though, of course, have done so many times. Similarly, we never had package theft in Seattle. I don't know how I could claim that isn't a thing, though.
You probably just live in a safe neighborhood frankly. I live in a safe hood in SF and never got anything stolen, and I've seen only one broken car window in the past year. It's night and day compared to Paris for me.
I agree with you. Boston has an old reputation for sketchy areas. It surely was justified at one point, too (as well as outlying areas; Somerville was a bit eyebrow-raising when I was young, I remember that). But for most of the city, especially the places folks on HN are likely to ever be, it's quite safe. My parents sent me breathless statistics about Dorchester being a hive of scum and villainy and for being among "the least safe" areas of Boston, I never even saw a broken window, let alone heard gunshots or read reports of violence.
> Without comparing to other high density cities for basic theft, I don't really find this that useful. :(
It's useful to also gather the sentiment. It doesnt matter if SF is the best city if they're all bad. At a certain point it doesnt matter if you're slightly better than unacceptable -- it's still unacceptable.
If the surveying is accurate and representative, it's useful because it means that crime is unusually indiscriminate (high rates of anonymous crime.)
Crime more typically happens between people with connections to each other. For example, my city has a per capita crime rate similar to San Fransisco's, but most don't experience it unless they live or work in a few neighborhoods (or single intersections in some cases.) In my city, something like 5-10% of people would report having recently been a victim of a crime, despite the number of crimes per capita being similar.
Drama aside, that's exactly once, about 16 years ago, and it was (i reckon) some kids that came in through an open window and took a backpack (cool cameo design), a gaming console, and my sons bike.
(Perth, Westerm Australia)
Total cost - well under theft insurance rates which I have yet to subscribe to.
Point being "nearly half" doesn't convey nearly as much infomation as the scare reaction to the statement warrents.
There's an important line that SF has not crossed (yet): murder still causes police response. In a decade or so, it will be like most large Latin American cities: murder will cause same lackluster police response as currently car break-ins do. Rich will have their own security, and poor will be afraid to walk after dark.
I wanted to add: unlike our virtuous downvoters, i have been traveling for 5 years, and i have actually been to most Latin American capitals: Guatemala City, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Managua, etc... It's not the immigrants from those places that thieve , but the government of SF is like that of Managua.
Alright, my bike-related tally over ~6 years in SF:
- 2 stolen bike seats (one by 4th and King, one in the Mission)
- 1 entire bike stolen (left out in the Castro overnight)
- 1 rear wheel stolen (in a parking garage by the SF Symphony)
- 1 seat post clamp (literally just the clamp they had to remove the seat, take off the clamp, then put the seat back; during a 30 minute piano lesson in the Mission)
But that doesn't included the most egregious thing that I ever witnessed: I was running up to Twin Peaks on a Saturday morning, and right around noon, in the mini parking lot between the actual two peaks, with dozens of people milling about, heard someone break a car window while there was someone in the vehicle and grab a bag. A woman was seated in the passenger seat and they broke the rear driver-side window. Within seconds a car pulled up with no license plates, the guy jumped in and they sped off.
SF "doesn't have the resources" to deal with your smashed car window, but park for 2.5 hours in a 2-hour zone and you can rest assured they have the resources to ticket you for that.
A lot of the bay area is filled with people from another country who try to keep a low profile in order to not ruffle any feathers and risk their visa/immigration status. Along with that they have the right to pay taxes, but not to vote.
I've had my car broken into twice in SF. Everyone's response to this is always "you can't leave valuable things in your car". Both times, my car was empty. Nothing was stolen. I have never left anything valuable in my car -- visible or hidden, trunk or otherwise. Not sure why people keep giving me this advice.
I always keep a roll of duct tape and some cardboard in the car now. I tape up my quarter glass (the smallest of the rear windows that thieves love to break) and cover it with cardboard, to make it look like its already been broken into. I also leave my back seat down w/ a clear view into the empty trunk. That's the only thing that works.
I’ve been burglarized 4 times, in 4 different cities, in 2 US states, and once in Europe.
I’ve lived in SF twice and in a few other Bay Area cities, and I honestly can’t tell you that my personal experience with crime in SF is all that different from the norm in most urban areas.
There are places I’ve lived which seem devoid of crime, but these places seem to have more community in common than leadership or laws.
Although I’ve experienced crime, I also know that the level of crime, violent or not, has dramatically dropped over my lifetime and the probability of experiencing it is greatly reduced by living in densely populated areas.
I’m 50 and have lived in 11+ cities over my lifetime. I’ve never been robbed. How is it that one person can get robbed 4 times and another no times? It’s not like I’ve ever lived in a gated community or anything like that.
People do different things and hang out with different people and that has big effects on their experience of life.
One of my friends when I moved to Shanghai has been in multiple fights in or near bars. I had never had that happen to me. During the next two years as I acquired an active social life involving a great deal of alcohol and spending a lot of time around a friend who does not back down and has a strong sense of personal honour and virtue I was threatened with a baseball bat and got the world’s tiniest stab wound. After my friend calmed down and went out and drank less I just don’t experience this stuff anymore. The variety of human experience is large.
Random coincidence? Once I was the victim of racism in an odd way - my neighbor actually told me they were sure the people burglarizing my house weren’t doing so because they were white. Pretty ironic.
- it's socially acceptable for techies to consume some drugs while hanging out in Dolores park, where we can be heard complaining about the visible drug use in the tenderloin
- people have mostly given up caring that Uber, AirBnB grew with a playbook of entering markets and initially ignoring local laws.
Neighborhood quality-of-life crimes ought to be the lowest hanging fruit that municipal police and prosecutors could possibly handle. If they can't catch & charge bicycle thieves, what business do they have investigating corruption at city hall, wage theft or PG&E negligence?
I live in northern Virginia, and I have never been a victim of theft. If this poll is correct, that amount of theft is insane. Regardless of the causes, this seems like a pretty serious problem.
Do the 50% who do claim they are victims of theft say it only happened to them a single time? In my experience, the people who admit they are the victims of theft have countless stories of it happening to them.
Not even package theft? Maybe it's who I know, but all the nova residents I personally know complain about packages being stolen off their porch. That and theft of bikes or bike parts. Whether these count seems to vary a lot. Most people don't bother to file a police report, so they won't show up in a city/county's theft stats. But if a poll (like this one) asked me if I had ever been a victim of theft (and didn't further specify), I would include that kind of opportunistic theft in my answer.
> You seem to be implying that it's right and proper for cities to have high crime.
That's a really odd reading. From my vantage point it looks more like anecdotal evidence from within an area with usually lower crime rates and attempting to extrapolate to the larger city/ies.
The poster is only saying it is typical that crime in cities is higher than in surrounding suburbs, in the US. They didn't say anything about "right and proper" -- that's your spin.
I'm not the OP but I personally would imply that a wealthy and low density area would have a lower rate of petty theft than a dense and urban environment full of a diverse group of people (with diverse incomes and diverse needs).
Not that it should have, but that it can be expected.
My rental car got broken into early evening in Palo Alto last year .. just behind the nice restaurants on University Ave. I think the crime increase may be a bit more defused.
Lots of people I know have been a victim of theft multiple times. Laptops, car windows, bikes, anything left for a moment will be stolen and most of the time the police will chastise YOU for letting your things be stolen, if they even come take a report which they avoid as much as they possibly can.
Now that the tax base is racing for the exits it is going to be the next Detroit. Detroit used to be the richest city in the US. What will they call it, the digital rust belt?
I left my car unlocked by mistake in my buildings garage (the gate's not working for some time). Lost my sunglasses, mint and charging cable. They'd get in for anything. When I moved to SF, everyone told me to not leave anything, not even change in the car. Seemed extreme, but kind of true.
My friend lost locked bike from his locked garage in apartment building few days ago.
Just to clarify for those who won't fully understand this.
The temperature range is very tight and mild so you don't need to think very hard about how to dress for the elements. For me jeans and a tshirt was basically year round attire. When it rained the extra warmth of a rain jacket was enough to offset the slightly cooler weather. You can run outdoors year round, save for a couple weeks of heat wave, or a bit in the "winter" if you refuse to run in the rain.
However, it's not the sunny beach, wear a bikini / no shirt weather that many have come to understand of California from hollywood movies.
This is my primary explanation when I lived in the city. I would walk my dog to the top of Buena Vista park nearly every morning at sunrise and marvel at the city in awe.
I'm not a big fan of SF and have only been twice but I see the appeal. There are a ton of job opportunities for tech workers (yes, there are a ton of opportunities for SWEs just about everywhere but SF is another level, especially if you like startups). Weather there is almost always reasonably comfortable. You're on the ocean. Mountains for skiing/snowboarding, hiking, climbing, whatever else you might want to do are close enough that you can reasonably drive to them on the weekend. And it's got all the standard big city things: diverse selection of really good food, live music, clubs/night life, an lgbtq+ scene, art, just lots of culture in general.
The weather is mild and predictable for large portions of the year. Good seafood, killer Asian cuisine, and Union Square has an AG store for your quality pant needs. What more could one want?
The whole California coast is pretty moderate. Once you’re a bit from the ocean it can be pretty nice year-round, many houses don’t have heating or cooling to speak of.
If you’re without 20 minutes of the ocean that is! Once you go east of La Mesa the summer days are pretty warm and USA’s most expensive electricity rates become more painful
I mean if a single package being stolen from your porch counts, then I'm surprised it isn't higher over five years. And porch pirates abound in suburbia too.
The actual scary thefts are home breakins and muggings. I feel like the headline wants you to think it's those, when it's mostly stolen packages or something.
Responses to the question "During the last five years, was any item you owned ever stolen from you, or did that not happen during that time?"
Note that it does not specify that you reported a theft. Note that it does not ask any real context about what was stolen and how.
If I was answering this, in Chicago, I’d have to say yes to how that was worded, because I’ve had an Amazon package or 2 disappear. But while that’s a valid question, I’d prefer more granular questions, because let’s be honest here, Amazon does refunds, there’s a big gap between a bag of dog food going missing and getting your car broken into.
“Have any of your vehicles or properties been physically damaged by theft?”
“Have you been physically assaulted for theft?”
“Have you been pickpocketed?”
(I’ve love numbers on that in Chicago. I feel like almost everyone I know has their phones stolen in 2021 at various festivals.)
Most of my friends in Chicago had experienced thefts... in the mid-1990s. It's part of living in a big city, and of parking your car on the street or locking a bike up outside a business.
These years, I think you'd have a hard time finding many houses where I live in Chicagoland that haven't had a package theft. And, like, I don't like that package theft is a nearly risk-free crime? But it's very low on my list of public policy priorities.
"There are lies, damn lies and then statistics"-- Mark Twain
EDIT: I'm not claiming for or against this specific article, just saying people need to be wary when reading such statistics as there are lot of parameters that influence such a headline number
bumped into someone holding a giant knife while opening the door to leave my apartment in soma.
Bike stolen in locked garage in locked bike cage with u lock. Usually take it in my apt, but stolen the one time I left it overnight.
Saw techies get shoved into fences on embarcadero
Wine bottle thrown across the store in Safeway. Saw things being stolen from Safeway ~25% the time I went shopping. Mentally Ill people perpetually wandering the store.
Saw many physical altercations between security guards in Walgreens many times. Saw someone being tackled then spitting in the Gaurd’s face while trying to be held down.
People following me while my parents were visiting shouting profanities
Seeing car break ins in the middle of the day.
Many scary situations
Lived there 9 years. Can confirm it got much worse in the past few years.
Because there are two cities: One of the ultra-rich and one for every one else. If you take your Maserati or Model X from your garage to an underground parking lot with a security guard, you don't care that there are thefts happening on the streets. Similar reasoning applies for every other issue people complain about. Don't like open-air markets for selling stolen goods in the Mission District? Simply don't go there. Out of sight, out of mind.
SF's whole thing is that not even the mass affluent can avoid the "bad" areas in the way that even the middle class do in most metros. Tons of tech workers live or have offices in SOMA, Mid-Market, FiDi, Mission, etc. where the sidewalk conditions can be astounding.
That's how desperate people are for walkability in the US. Cities that offer something different from the car-dependent postwar sprawl that pervades this country are so few and so desired that they face no real pressure to be well governed.
It's mostly engineers who either used to work around there, or still work around there. There isn't that much housing so you still get a high demand low supply kind of problem.
It is the momentum from last 30 years of innovation in SV/SFBA. Measuring current state of wealth is not a good indicator, you need to look at the rate of change and the acceleration of people moving out of bay area.
I've found official stats to be a lagging indicator of anecdata, and my anecdata shows a lot of people moving away. If I owned an expensive condo there I'd sell ASAP.
New Jersey used to be a major economic hub in the US. Now it's a state with corruption, high taxes, low quality of life and a net migration out for a long time.
Nothing says it can't happen here. Hell, SF lost like 20% of it's population between 1950 and 1980.
New Jersey is basically just the suburb of two different cities. The NYC suburb side of it seems very high QoL IME, and while expensive it's substantially cheaper than trying to live in a Bay area suburb. NJ is also dense AF for a state still, so I'm not sure I'm worried about the supposed emigration.
San Francisco was one of the best places to live for a long time. Excellent weather, a thriving economy, top-tier pop culture status, etc. There were few advantages SF did not have.
But things have clearly gone off track. As a political conservative, I tend to think about political excess (on the left side). Others may see it differently, I wouldn't blame them if they did. No matter what, I hope SF pulls things together and quickly. I also hope the solutions are transferable, because it seems some other cities have the same kind of sickness.
What I don't understand is why this is simply normalized. My friends in the Bay Area refuse to leave anything in the trunk of their own car, even if no one has seen them put it in the trunk in the first place.
Speakers stolen out of my car while parked at a law firm. I was temp help, but it blew me away at the time that I could have my car broken into when parked at a law firm. I gained a bit more cynical armor that day.
Don’t get me wrong, Baltimore has fun bars and Orioles games are fun..but I’ve never once heard anyone try to sell Baltimore as a great place for tech workers to live and work from
It's no surprise that SF, Portland, and Seattle are the worst of the worst. Tech workers exasperate inequality and vote in virtue signalers (to be clear, I agree with the goals, I don't agree with deciding to do nothing about these problems). If you have a good spot, seriously, keep it secret
He might be talking about Baltimore County. Though parts of Baltimore are fairly to pretty nice like Canton, Fells Point and Harbor East. These neighborhoods are mostly populated by professionals. These neighborhoods could see a murder cumulatively once every few months or less.
One annoying thing in Baltimore is the squeege kids. Umm I have no need for you to come up to my car and wash my windows..I have windshield wipers.
As for homeless, drug addicts, and the mentally ill ..they do not litter the streets along with their problems like they do in the wasteland that is San Francisco.
For me there's no city in the US as walkable as NYC or SF. NYC is super busy, but I just like how I could bike / walk / transit virtually anywhere within the city.
I dunno, I think Chicago is certainly more walkable and less car-dependent than SF. Then you have DC, which probably is (substantially more public transit at least) as well, and even cities like Minneapolis which are probably more amenable to walking over a larger area than the actual core, downtown SF area.
SF has ok public transit for the west coast I suppose. But overall it’s quite poor compared to the east coast from DC north, or a city like Chicago.
Honestly, it's not that bad. I find that once I'm properly bundled up, outdoor temps between 20° and 30° are downright comfortable. It's not until about 15° that you get the cold that just seeps in everywhere, and it rarely gets that low in Chicago (at least at any time of day I'd be walking outside).
High-density and car-hostile != walkable. If walking means that you have to always be watching your step to avoid feces and used hypodermic needles, and you're constantly getting accosted for money or worse, that's at least as unwalkable as the stroads of suburbia.
A lot of unbelievable stats in this article. "only 12% of residents say that racism does not make solving problems more difficult." That's an odd finding to me. SF has always struck me as very progressive, but now I'm seeing that a large majority of the city thinks the city has a racism problem.
A lot of the visible homeless are not suffering primarily from lack of wealth but from mental health. Another segment chose that lifestyle to be free of responsibility and don't want to change. There are, of course, also people that are homeless for economic reasons, but as I understand it, they tend to be less visible, partly because they are doing things like working and sleeping in their car.
The problem is that what helps the last segment will enable the second segment and not help the first, but everyone talks as if all the homeless are down on their luck. Maybe it's because there is no obvious solution to how to care for the mentally ill, and the previous solution of institutionalization turned out so badly that anything resembling that is just off the table. However, people that do not have the ability to take care of themselves need some sort of sheltering environment, which is basically an "institution". And there is no solution for people who choose not to participate in society, which is relatively okay if they just keep to themselves, but the idea that some people choose of their own volition to do things that cause a breakdown in community (like stealing, defecating on the streets, etc.) seems to be a forbidden concept to Progressives. But each of those three groups needs a different tactic.
SF is funny. If you complain about the crime, lots of long-time residents are loath to admit crime has gone up. "It's been like this since I can remember." "Born and raised fifth generation SFer, no, it's always been like this."
Ideology gets the best of people and they don't want to believe.
Sure, there have been nadirs before, the 80's after all industry left and only some financial services were left downtown --there were vagrants and muggings but for the most part, if you kept away from the bad neighborhoods, you were unaffected.
Now, theft is rampant and unabated. It will take years to recover from "Defund the Police" and No-bail, charge drooping DAs. It takes time to recruit Police and good Prosecutors.
I’m not exactly invested in a side here, but doesn’t the first article concede that people aren’t reporting larceny crimes because the police aren’t doing anything about it?
Could your data not be completely accounted for by a decrease in public trust in police effectiveness to address instances of crime at the level of individual instances?
Could you prove this is taking place? If not then I don't see how it invalidates the data. It could just as well be that people are more willing to report crime now.
The only evidence available to us implies that crime is going down. Ideology is the only reason you might believe otherwise without evidence.
I see smoke, but the fire department has not confirmed that there’s a fire. Therefore, there’s no fire, and ideology is the only reason I might believe?
Note that I didn’t say “without evidence” at the end - smoke is evidence, as is an article that you’re commenting on talking about thefts that are common enough to make half of a city’s citizens victims in a five year period. And, you cite a source that notes that people aren’t reporting because nothing comes of it.
I mean, what reason other than ideology would explain your unwillingness to take that stuff as evidence?
> I see smoke, but the fire department has not confirmed that there’s a fire. Therefore, there’s no fire, and ideology is the only reason I might believe?
In this example you cold point to the smoke as first-hand evidence. Can you point to equivalent evidence that people are underreporting crimes?
I'm only asking to see evidence showing underreporting, a claim you made. No ideology here.
The Mayor of San Francisco appointed a tough-on-crime prosecutor who has spoken in public in favor of reviving failed policies like the war on drugs, purged employees hired by her progressive predecessor, and canceled investigations into police misconduct. You already have the most reactionary, cuff-em-and-stuff-em prosecutor you’re likely to get in San Francisco. So if crime is still a problem, you’re going to have to come up with a new excuse.
Also, SFPD’s budget was not cut in the wake of protests against police violence. There was no defunding of police in San Francisco. You can’t blame their inaction on policies that were not implemented here.
Did you even read the article? They weren't meeting these numbers for a long time.
>The proposition also requires San Francisco to end a requirement that there be a specified number of full-duty sworn police officers assigned to neighborhood policing and patrol — a number law enforcement officials say has never been met due to resource constraints.
No, we voted to give the city the authority to reduce the size of the police force. They haven’t actually used that authority. Nor have they reduce the police budget.
Chesa left office in early July. That's only a little over 3 months ago. If the situation hasn't improved in a year or two, you would have a point. Right now, it looks more like you are bending the facts to fit a particular political agenda.
The district attorney until last July was a very progressive opposite of tough on crime prosecutor named Chesa Boudin. In july he lost a recall election, and Breed appointed Brooke Jenkins who was also previously a DA but quit to support the recall election of Boudin. Jenkins has to run for the position in November - currently she's only serving the rest of Boudin's term.
So the 'tough on crime' stuff is very new, at the speed the courts move.
As for the police, the people said they hate the police and the police heard them loud and clear, and are leaving on their own. For the same reasons, far fewer people are interested in joining their police force.
Why be a police officer in a place that hates you?
As I point out downthread, it will take time for this to manifest. Compare and Contrast Daly City/San Mateo county. It's not like the USSR where you bring in a show team to convict and send everyone to the Gulags overnight and instill fear through marxist means. No, this takes time and effort to turn around. From Koch to Dinkins to Giuliani --it takes time to tamp down crime.
For things to straighten out support for rule-of-law has to manifest from bottom to top and back. From Citizens, to Public Figures, to Influencers, to Representatives, to Captains, to Prosecutors, DAs and the Mayor. We have some of that. You can't have situations where the police try to arrest someone and you get a mob questioning police motives and then complain when the police don't come.
That’s crazy, I actually show up every morning to do my job without the Mayor personally telling me that I’m brave and handsome every day. There’s a fair amount of stickers outside my apartment that say things like “Die Techie Scum,” and yet, I keep showing up for work to do the job I get paid to do.
Maybe we should find some cops who are capable of doing the job they’re paid to do, instead of insisting on a wholesale cultural revolution to protect their fragile egos at all costs.
What mistake, you think the DA snaps her fingers and the system self-heals and self assembles? Even in private enterprise a bad CEO can take years to recover from, here we're taking government --so you're going to have to wait some time for results.
But some of your assertions of the underlying issue (eg the police being defunded) lack a factual foundation. You're lecturing us about the correct solution to a fictional problem.
> It will take years to recover from "Defund the Police"
There has not been any reduction of the SF police budget in this century.
The Mayor made a speech in 2020 suggesting that some funds would be redirected from police budgets into some social programs, but this did not represent any actual reduction in police funding.
If you are under the impression that SF was in any way affected by “defunding the police,” you are mistaken, because that didn’t happen.
At this point it's basically the monty python "its just a flesh wound" scene.
Anyone who has visited SF knows exactly whats going on.
Anyone who lives in SF also knows exactly whats going on. They'll just desperately point to some statistic from a tiny town they've never been to that actually measures and enforces the law.
Anything to justify continuing to vote for whatever the media tells them to vote for next.
The situation is not unlike steering a barge. It takes time, lots of time for your actions to manifest (and of course you can overcorrect, or undercorrect as you don't see immediate effect).
Jenkins wasted no time disbanding the group within the DA's office that was responsible for investigating and prosecuting police misconduct. The barge ain't that big.
In the latest reorganizational move from appointed incumbent District Attorney
Brooke Jenkins, the attorney prosecuting former police officer Christopher
Samayoa for the shooting death of unarmed civilian Keita O’Neil will be removed
from the case.
The announcement came in the form of an Aug. 12 all-staff memo from Jenkins,
obtained by Mission Local. Assistant District Attorney James Conger was the
last remaining prosecutor hired by ousted DA Chesa Boudin in the Independent
Investigations Bureau of the DA’s office. That unit investigates police
shootings and most police misconduct cases that may warrant criminal
prosecution.
Sure, there have been nadirs before, the 80's after all industry left and only some financial services were left downtown --there were vagrants and muggings but for the most part, if you kept away from the bad neighborhoods, you were unaffected.
When I first came to SF the city was int he grip of a crack epidemic and. I've seen people get shot in the face broad daylight and been in the middle of a driveby. The city is going through an uptick in crime at the moment but its mainly property crime. I don't feel significantly less safe, though that's partly because I have a lot of experience with unsafe situations.
A large part of this is simply driven by poverty and prices. Policymakers, business owners, and pundits naturally want a city full of high-earning go-getters whose money will increase the general level of prosperity, fair enough. But there's some sort of naive belief that people at the bottom end of the scale magically teleport themselves away to other labor/residential markets where they'll be more competitive, because economics class made it look just that simple.
> Now, theft is rampant and unabated. It will take years to recover from "Defund the Police" and No-bail, charge drooping DAs.
I agree that ideology gets the best of people. For example there is a baffling group of people set on blaming all current and future crime on a previous DA and absolving the current DA, mayor and SFPD leadership of _any_ responsibility for what goes on in the city.
It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me rationally, but I understand the appeal of having a singular boogeyman to blame everything on, kind of like Evangelicals and their fixation on Satan.
This is likely still lower than a lot lot lot lot lot of jurisdictions where prosecutors and cops don't even make any sort of effort at theft cases until the facts of the case allows for a more serious charge to stick and the theft is irrelevant. I had two bikes stolen from me, while I was personally at the Public Defender's Office, working in Spokane. Nobody called the police for that kind of stuff, and if you did, the police wouldn't do anything. It's compounded by the fact that the elements of Burglary - which is trespass + felony, no actual stealing needed, in WA - covers the really serious thefts that are seldom solved anyway, but counting burglaries would be overbroad, but reporting a theft can be yelling into the wind even with a police force that's funded by the government AND reality TV show money. Since the same poll wasn't conducted in multiple cities, there's no frame of reference. This could be very bad, or could just be a lack of points of reference when it comes to actual acts of criminal conduct that happens but never gets reported. So, without more data, the road paved with good intentions leads to a place to be named later.
Love how community organizers are building tiny houses and creating communities and cleaning up litter and the city just tears it down and gives us tents and shipping containers instead...
It costs as much in California, because of activism that deliberately makes it more expensive than necessary and then claims that it is too expensive to make sense. California could strike a deal with Kentucky, Oklahoma, or Nevada to send their prisoners there at half the price it costs to incarcerate them in California, and save billions while allowing the destination states to make very nice profit as well. Of course, this is not going to happen, because high prison costs in California is a feature, not a bug.
Prevention is better than cure... I don't find this price surprising unfortunately. A strong social security net and healthcare for all would cost much less to society and cause less suffering.
I do the same in Las Vegas, "sin city" moniker and all. I lived in Boston, NYC, LA, Montreal, and Spokane. I had two bikes stolen while I was working at the county public defender's and my girlfriend called the police, filed out a report, and nothing ever came down the line on the other side. The officer tried to talk her out of filing the report. Since I've worked in other jurisdictions and have heard broadly about how few fucks are given about property crimes generally, we don't even know how high or low this figure is in comparison to other cities with different policies. It could very well be true that people are experiencing recency bias, triggered by a question that touches upon something that wasn't taken seriously to begin with.
Also, I live in Las Vegas now and I also don't know anyone who had their car broken into or packages stolen. I left my Steam Deck outside for 48 hours since it was delivered early and hidden poorly, but I wasn't looking and didn't even notice it. But since none of the polls - the Chronicle or the Standard's - mention vehicle prowling, we have even less data on that. Why even bring it up? Nobody was expecting Rumble in the Bronx (great movie in spite of the whole movie being made up of stereotypes).
It's personal preference but (to pick an example) many other large cities in the US have both lower crime and lower cost of living. For some folks those attributes weigh heavily in the mix of things they think make a city "good". Other people have other preferences.
I live in SF, but I absolutely understand why many people think other places are better for them.
I agree to a point. You can't say LA is better than NYC. You can't say London is better than Tokyo. It all depends.
But sometimes this is like comparing a little league team to an MLB team: For example, you can say NYC is better than SF.
For every axis that SF is better on, NYC is 10x better on 10 others. Like you could argue the foggy weather is better because there's no snow... but then: food, transportation, global importance, crime (even when you account for violent crime specifically), long-term prospects...
SF can't even keep a Target open past 8.
At the start of the year I moved to SF from NYC, so I'm not validating anything by the way.
I live in Bernal Heights. Maybe that's why I haven't seen a human poop on the sidewalk in.... well never, anywhere near me. Probably seen it twice in 20 some years living here, and not anywhere close to here.
Were you aware that the Tenderloin is, ya know, what it is, before you got an apartment there? It's been well known as the seediest part of the city for a century or more.
I knew, yes. I was on a budget at the time. $1550 for a studio with no kitchen was the cheapest thing I could find on short notice that wasn’t too weird. It was a great location, and the was pretty cool, just a little shitty (pun intended).
I’ll be sure to develop a Cartel app for Miami, a Kidnapping app for the state of Texas, and a Homeless app for Denver so you have more content to post in the future
Copaganda, a shorthand for the tendency of police communications officials to make wildly false statements to influence public opinion, is indeed a real issue.
What does it have to do with an opinion poll like this though?
Copaganda also describes true but misleading statements, and includes things like news organizations naïvely taking the cops at their word, shows like CSI and Law & Order, etc.
In this case, "Any item stolen from you?" seems to include having an Amazon package stolen off your porch, which happens widely (including to me) here in suburban upstate NY too.
Porch piracy seems the easiest thing in the world to catch especially in the era of work from home and infinite ring cameras. Not bothering indicates nobody really cares because Amazon is subsidizing it.
Extremely relevant here though. It's propaganda in the sense that there is much more media handwringing about a missing package on an upper middle class person's porch than there is about thousands of dollars of wage theft a year from poor workers. It's these misplaced priorities all together that make the propaganda work.
Edit to add: this example just happened to be on my mind recently. I intended it as an evocative example of priority setting, not as a thorough proof or something. But there is plenty of other evidence that crime reporting is carried out according to a propagandist program. For example, media critics have carefully surveyed how routine crime statistics are reported, and found that the ones that get headlines are often extremely cherry-picked and reported on out of context. Like "murders in neighborhood x increased 20% this year" is often the headline when murders overall in the area are going down, other crime is down even in that neighborhood, and the 20% is based on a baseline of like 10 murders anyway, so the 20% increase is well within the noise. And of course, they leave out the comparison to ten or thirty years ago, when the rate was substantially higher. Crime reporting is like that year after year, no matter what is happening to crime rates overall. Not to mention that "so and so thinks briefly about reducing police budget" is considered newsworthy -- even when those budget reductions rarely come into effect -- while the norm of police budgets that balloon year after year and are overspent year after year is rarely mentioned.
It’s misleading because headlines like this evoke muggings and breakins more than having your bottle of shampoo disappear from your porch, and because there’s no corresponding rate elsewhere to compare against.
Most of the folks in my very low crime neighborhood have still lost a package once every few years. Are we technically crime victims? Sure. Is our area dangerous? lol, no.
The headline says half of SF residents in survey have been victims of theft.
Which is exactly what the survey results said.
What's the misleading part.
It didn't say muggings or break-ins it said theft.
It also didn't ask if people felt their neighborhood was dangerous. That's a different type of question that also isn't necessarily a crime statistic.
For example, do you think it's dangerous if there's a deranged person outside your home with a knife claiming he's going to knife the next infant he sees? According to crime statistics that's completely irrelevant to the neighborhood's safety.
Different numbers measure different things.
It's just such an odd specific criticism to call a survey copaganda, when it appears to be one of the very very few crime related metrics I have read that is NOT collected and communicated by cops.
This is more about a breakdown in the rule of law. The DA wasn't prosecuting and the police weren't arresting.
Blaming it on "inequality" feels like a cop out for the criminals. There are plenty of ways to get by in the world without resorting to theft. It's a lifestyle choice more than it's any significant source of income.
Stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is one thing. Virtually all of the theft in SF is quite another.
Boudin prosecuted a higher percentage of cases than Jenkins. In fact Jenkins dropped a number of cases that Boudin brought and she disbanded the group investigating and prosecuting corruption within SFPD ranks.
the police weren't arresting.
This, however, is completely true and hasn't changed since Breed installed her pick for DA. Let's not forget that Breed required pre-signed resignation letters from all of her appointees, and has controlled any messaging from the DA's office with an iron fist.
Per Boudin’s office, the findings show a hard-working, hard-prosecuting DA.
“The District Attorney’s Office filed charges in 57% of arrests presented by
police in 2021, the highest filing rate in the ten years the DA’s Office has
been tracking this data,” the report states. As seen above, that statistic
cites an “action rate” on suspects higher than it’s been in ten years, and a
“discharged without further action” rate lower than it’s ever been over that
period.
No tricks, no "doublethink", no "he would've been prosecuted but for restorative justice". Boudin prosecuted the cases brought to him at a higher rate than his predecessors (and successor). Let's not forget what this is really about: Boudin prosecuted cops, Jenkins does not.
I don't get this doublethink, but it comes up all the time. They ran on a platform of not prosecuting crime because it is unfair to do so. They were elected. They didn't prosecute crimes.
I don't understand who you think you are going to trick into this nonsense that Boudin was super tough on crime. It's so embarrassing for you.
Since people are trying to rewrite the narrative here to avoid taking responsibility for a failed experiment:
'''Restorative justice is a survivor-centered alternative to the traditional prosecution model that attacks mass incarceration on two fronts. First, through a process focused on active accountability rather than passive punishment, people who have harmed others are equipped with the tools they need to stop harming others in the future. They may receive education, job training, counseling, substance use treatment, and more, and upon successfully completing the restorative justice process, may avoid prosecution.'''
Boudin prosecuted felonies brought to him, but only around 3% of arrests for misdemeanors. Petty theft had about around a 7% conviction rate- most cases ended up being dismissed or diverted out of court.
Police just stopped bothering to present crimes that fell into the categories that weren't being prosecuted. Why would they put in the time and effort to present a petty theft case if the DA's office is publicly on record saying they won't prosecute it?
I've lived in several cities, and they all share in common police's complete unwillingness to investigate petty theft. Businesses seem to have no problem, but private citizens just aren't a high priority. I realize San Francisco has wider issues with crime enforcement, but petty theft is under-investigated and enforced in many places unfortunately.
I think the annoying thing about SF is you'd find way more people OK with the idea to not pursue non-violent crimes, defund the police, or reduce police presence because the relationship with community is bad and mass-incarceration is a problem. And they are real problems, but also they are not going to get fixed in a year or even five years. There are certainly good number of people who are balanced in terms of supporting a trade-off between long term and short term solutions, but the voices in the extreme are definitely more heard.
You often can't even casually rant about this, without getting a whole debate in response just for sake of having a debate and being woke.
> And they are real problems, but also they are not going to get fixed in a year or even five years.
SF could easily be fixed in a year. Zero tolerance policing, locking up drug abusing vagrants, and broken windows style follow up would work wonders.
The problem is that the sheer force of will to get it done simply does not exist. Nobody in power is willing to step up and take the inevitable heat for the action that is sorely needed.
I think at risk of sounding like the people I was criticizing, I think extreme measures in short amount of time is probably not practical, at-least not without unintended negative consequences.
I wont pretend to understand how the whole system works, but I think one thing I understand well is that its all fucking complicated. And it's not as simple as "lock everyone" or "abolish the police".
But I agree, nobody in power is willing to step up and take action.
Education polarization. San Francisco is unequal because it has significant numbers of high income people. High income people have progressive political views.
College educated workers are to the left of and also earn more than the median American. A region with a large professional-managerial workforce in addition to its working class is more unequal than a region with only working class people.
Being in the upper quartile of the distribution yourself is no insurance against resenting those higher up.
Lived in SF for 15 and never had a package stolen either. In fact UPS would leave my packages on the steps (sometimes mine sometimes someone else's) all the time. I had a check stolen before it made it to my PO box once, USPS found it and returned it to me but that's not quite the narrative people are pushing.
San Francisco has its heart in the right place and is struggling to grapple with the reality that lax drug laws invites the wrong kind of people to the city.
So does basically legalizing theft for under $950, choosing not to prosecute "property crimes" and so-called bail reform where most people are just released back into society after arrest. All sound good until put into practice.
Yeah, no. Theft under $950 is still theft and it's still illegal. If you're whining about the felony threshold $950 puts it pretty much middle of the road compared to the other forty-nine states. Hell, the threshold in Texas is over $2,000 and has been that high since before Prop. 47 was passed. Find another boogeyman already.
Those other states still prosecute though. And although a misdemeanor isn't as big of a deal as a felony, having to go to court and deal with probation etc. acts as a huge deterrent that you don't get if something just isn't prosecuted.
Boudin prosecuted most cases that were brought to him. In fact he prosecuted a larger percentage than his successor has so far. Boudin also prosecuted police misconduct which made him a lot of enemies.
They really don't, and it's important for people to know that or they might be under the illusion it will be fixed at some point.
The people who vote in SF and run the government there are obsessed with punishing some undefined "privileged" set of people who are somehow causing all the issues. Of course they are themselves highly privileged so it's a self hatred.
Switzerland and Portugal are the counter examples that prove you wrong. Both decriminalized drugs and treat them as the medical problem that they really are. The heroin problem was especially bad in Switzerland and you could find homeless addicts all over public places.
That's not right. It's not that they don't allow open drug scenes.
In Lisbon you can easily find the part of town where everyone is smoking weed outside.
With Switzerland if you want your free heroin it's at the doctor's office and you get it injected there. So it's not a matter of not allowing it. Addicts not surprisingly go where the drugs are. Which is inside now.
Back when they treated it as a crime problem they would shut down outdoor drug camps and the camps would just reappear somewhere else nearby.
The theft went down because the addicts don't need to pay. It's not about better enforcement as you implied. The theft also went down because a lot of the addicts are now employed. As long as you can get your daily injections, most heroin addicts are highly functional. Dr. Halsted - one of the founders of John Hopkins hospital and a hard working doctor - was addicted to morphine for most of his long adult life.
Not quite - the Swiss system much prefers substitutions than giving out actual heroin. And the police do enforce drug laws, mostly against the dealer networks but also against individuals for possession for other drugs. Also it's not like heroin is legalized. You must have been an addict for at least two years to get it from the health system, and it's a last resort, you must have failed at least two other addiction treatments first.
The Swiss approach was also somewhat specific to heroin. If you read about it, it's always heroin that's being discussed. The policy could work because there aren't huge numbers of addicts and the number has been in natural decline for a long time. Addicts are mostly old so the population is shrinking, the cost of giving them free drugs is low. Heroin addiction was a phase, people moved onto different drugs now, but the decline is often attributed entirely to this policy.
So what do we see if we look at e.g. crystal meth or cocaine? Not so successful there. Swiss cities dominate cocaine consumption in Europe:
Numbers of addicts are growing and the police do enforce the law, albeit in Neuchâtel for the first meth offense (of possession) you can get out of it if you attend some counselling sessions. After that it's back to prosecution.
They aren't handing out crystal meth, suffice it to say.
There is also the ethical issues involved with forcing people who stayed clean to pay for other people's addictions, which is what this boils down to. Of course it can still be rational when considering other costs but that doesn't change the underlying ethical issues.
Switzerland had a huge heroin problem. They fixed it by decriminalization and treating it as the medical problem it really is. You can now get the addictive drugs injected at your doctor's office. Both petty theft and addiction plummeted. So it's not the addictive drugs causing these things. It's the policy around drugs that is causing it.
See also how Portugal reduced a widespread heroin and crime problem.
The numbers speak for themselves. Read more at the link.
Between 1991 and 2010, overdose deaths in the country decreased by 50 percent, HIV infections decreased by 65 percent, and new heroin users decreased by 80 percent. Today, the so-called “four-pillar model” that guides Swiss drug policy—prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and law enforcement—is internationally recognized as a major step in redefining how to tackle narcotic drugs.
* Addicts are more effectively targetable for interventions to reduce or eliminate addiction.
* A safer environment may reduce other pressures that cause addicts to keep resorting to addiction.
* Supervised injections may let you go onto a schedule that lets you slowly wean yourself off of addiction. (e.g., using naloxone and methadone in lieu of heroin).
I feel like only those who live in San Francisco should comment on this. It's easy to pass judgement from afar, but the situation is, like all situations, difficult to grasp for people who live there, the insiders, and impossible to grasp by anyone else. SF is an incredibly unique place with a unique history and can you really get it if you don't live there?
I love it. We should apply this logic to all cities and states. The matters of cities and states are their own and the federal government or other states shouldnt tell the others how to live and run their own states because they dont really get it since they dont live there.
I’ve lived in a much larger city with a unique, and much longer, history of two millennia. Somehow it’s not crime ridden. Indeed, it’s hard for outsiders to grasp how SF managed to fail so spectacularly.
Lot's of people applying for CCW (gun carry permit) because they feel unsafe and it is near impossible to get one in SF city.
I am going to be following suit, I purchased a gun last year and going to apply for a CCW, but seems like the waiting list is 3 years and they are actively rejecting Bruen ruling by SCOTUS.
I'm not anti-gun, and fully appreciate the need to protect one's self (and household) at home, but if I ever felt the need to carry a gun outside my home, that would be my signal to move.
A lot of people don't have the luxury to move. Specialized jobs, family, extended family, etc. They can try to move to a nicer area but then financial limitations start impeding mobility.
A police officer was rolling through, telling people not to leave anything visible in their cars (nothing was visible in mine). I asked him if I could file a report, and he told me I would have to go to the station. He told me he wasn't sticking around and refused to take a report.
I had a similar experience last year with an officer who tried to talk us out of filing a report for a man with a hatchet who had shattered car windows with it, and I had a dispatcher refuse to send an officer for a theft crew that I'd stopped in the middle of breaking into a car before they waved a gun at me and drove at me and my son over the sidewalk.
I've also had them refuse to take reports at our neighborhood station, forcing me to go to the Mission station to file a report.
The police in San Francisco are less than useless. We should fire the whole set and start over.