As the news media and twitterverse peddled the whole "crime-ridden SF" angle, I felt myself getting drawn into the same topic and agreeing with numerous friends on how much the city has declined. This is a good reminder of how we gravitate towards powerful emotional narratives, which in the moment can feel absolutely true despite an utter lack of supporting facts on an individual murder case.
I hope this brings some measure of peace and closure for his family and friends.
After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 )
about the homeless, need for more law enforcement (although the US already incarcerates more of its population than any industrialized country) etc.
I had to read scores of tech bros in the professional-managerial class whinge about the poor, about black lives matter and how this was due to "progressivism".
Turns out the suspected murderer is a guy who describes himself as an "entrepreneur" on Linkedin and has a Crunchbase listing where he is described as being in executive management. Maybe we should have law enforcement target entrepreneurs as opposed to people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity on display in San Francisco.
I saw a reply to a thread on twitter where a woman said to one of his friends, something like, “sorry to burst your bubble but bob was a champion of ‘diversity’” and if that isn’t saying that quiet part out loud, hoof.
> people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity
There’s a tiny possibility that feckless bureaucrats, billions of dollars spent with no oversight, mental illness, and drug addiction share just a sliver of the responsibility
Sure, though if we're talking about crime, inequality is probably the strongest correlation to crime rates.[0]
"In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust."
Funny how questions like this were completely ignored in the previous conversation where people were shitting on the homeless, but suddenly are important now that the homeless aren't the target anymore.
Here's how the cycle works. We decide a certain group of people ("literally the dregs [sic] of society") causes most of our problems. Then we pass laws targeting that group, and enforce the laws most strictly against against that group — and surprise, that group ends up getting caught breaking the law most often! Then we use that to drum up further public sentiment against that group. Rinse, repeat.
Crime is a social construct. We choose what's illegal and what's not. We enforce some of the laws, against some of the people, some of the time. Saying that a certain group commits the vast majority of crimes is meaningless without additional context. And if your additional context is that they're "literally the dregs of society", you're not being serious — you just have an axe to grind.
More than you'd think. You're more likely to be murdered by someone you know than a stranger. iirc it's something like ~55% chance of someone you know, ~25% chance of a family member, ~45% chance of a stranger (which could be anything from drug deals gone bad to serial killers).
Yeah, this is something that frustrates me in every discussion about crime. People take a murder rate of X per hundred people and use that to argue that you have an X% chance of being murdered walking down the street. Except that's not true, because like you point out, your odds of being murdered by a rando are way lower than the murder rate as a whole!
This is exactly why the reactionary push for police in response to the murder spike in 2020 and 2021 made no sense. The issue wasn't that people were going out and murdering more — it was that they were locked down in their homes with the people most likely to murder them. You can't fix that by adding more beat cops.
That statistic could only possibly exist for solved murders. Only ~50% of murders are solved and it's much easier to solve if the victim knows the killer. This sounds like
a "looking for your keys under the street lights" scenario.
The person you are replying to is making a rational argument, not an empirical one. The premise that may be understated is "cases are more likely to be solved when the victim is known to the killer, because the amount of people who know a person is far smaller and more easily investigable than the entire general public."
Oh, I understand the premise. But one premise does not a good argument make. Maybe witnesses are less likely to cooperate if they know the murderer! Maybe this type of murder tends to happen inside homes, where there’s less likely to be evidence such as surveillance footage! Maybe it is easier but only by one or two percentage points! etc etc
Use the drugs that make you violent or so in need that they need to rob to get their next fix? Or the ones that make you think a lot and eat lots of tacos?
Nah it’s more of a “it’s easy to find a stick if you want to beat a dog” situation - drugs don’t make you do much of anything, aside from provide an excuse to do the thing you were too scared to do while sober. Drugs are the excuse, not the reason.
I’m not a violent guy, and I’ve never had a drug encourage me to act violently. Yes, even ‘those’ drugs.
I am however a lazy guy, and I’ve often had drugs encourage me to indulge my laziness.
Drugs can and do easily exacerbate pre-existing conditions. Especially mental health problems which would otherwise be controlled without intervention.
Many “crimes of passion” have had inebriation as a root cause of the lashing out.
> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?
Not for nothing, the mentally ill and/or drug addicts are no more likely to commit violent crime than you, i.e. the general population. It's amazing how with every suspect of violent crime, the first thing everyone wonders is about their mental health. Here's something to consider: everyone is mentally ill, and the majority of everyone is addicted to something or other. Let's stop demonizing mental illness and drug addiction, which are both medical conditions; stop looking for explanations there, and focus on one thing: the actual crime, the actual behavior, what happened, not what they where thinking and not if they were high. And fuck all else, especially the Goddamn bigotry. If you want a reason for violent crime, money's usually got everything to do with it. Use money as a lens, not personal biases. Because in my experience, the greatest individuals that have ever lived, that have contributed the most to humanity, were severely mentally ill, and the greatest artists, that contributed the most and most amazing pieces, paintings, music, film, that have survived the test of time, were drug addicts.
If you mean "What percentage of crimes are committed by," it's probably the second population. Probably. I'm actually pretty weak on that narrative right now.
If you mean "What percentage of the population described is committing violent crimes that should result in jail time," I'm even weaker on it. Because the homeless population is way, way larger than the tech-entrepreneur population, so by percentage of population I think it's a toss-up without hard numbers.
It doesn't take many dead executives on a yacht or strangled estranged wives to tilt the numbers when the population is small.
A reasonable question, but barely relevant to the emotional reaction to this specific tragedy, which involved a single victim and presumably a single killer and is unlikely to have much effect on the overall percentages.
> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?
Never really met anyone that described themselves as an 'entrepreneur' that actually was one though. Lots of people that wanted to desperately identify as one and they'd spend all their time telling anyone who'd listen that's what they were.
In contrast, the actual entrepreneurs are too busy actually going out there and building things. I think it's a label that only makes sense when it's applied by someone else.
read your comment as
"what percentage of entrepreneurs are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?"
which actually is a really interesting question.
If you want to get all numerical. Let's say an extremely generous 1% of SF population are tech entrepreneurs. 1 out of every 12 murders in SF this year was committed by a tech entrepreneur.
This would imply that Tech entrepreneurs were 12 times more likely to kill you than any other SF local, an astonishing 1100% higher murder likelihood than average!
Given that this is a forum frequented by a lot of SF Tech entrepreneurs, the FBI should monitor this forum or perhaps shut it down all together.
>After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this[...]
>I had to read scores of tech bros [...]
Did you though? I can't recommend enough cutting out reading people's comments that you don't want to read. If other people's comments stress you out and make you angry, there are typically actions you can take to expose yourself less to them.
The problem is that these reality-deficient narratives spill out into the real world where they have real consequences.
For example, the pitchforks came out to recall the "soft on crime" DA and replace him with a "tough on crime" one. Why didn't that fix anything? And why was the DA ever the problem when crime was actually down during his tenure, but had simply shifted neighborhoods as a result of covid emptying out the previous high-property-crime areas (downtown and fisherman's wharf)? People in other neighborhoods had every right to be upset that crime shifted to their area, but alleged city-wide policy changes never made any sense as an explanation for that.
Every time there's a crime panic, a bunch of "no more mr. nice guy" politicians throw a few thousand more people in prison for minor crimes in this country, which already imprisons more people per capita than any other country except this very short list of places: El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba. Think we can beat them?
It was obvious that commenters on HN were wilding out about this specific case—but even though the outpouring of rage about homelessness/Chesa Boudin/race/etc was clearly out of proportion with this single incident, it was useful to read people's thoughts. Just because people think differently than I do, doesn't make me less inclined to want to hear them or understand them. In this case, it was illuminating to see that there were so many people who were primed to perpetuate that narrative.
I can get why people blamed the SF politics but not why people blamed the homeless. Both in my experience and by statistics, homeless are not particularly aggressive or violent. It's unfortunately enough that they became homeless, and violent or aggressive people wouldn't stay homeless for long.
I don't think anyone is claiming it does. But what's your point, really? It sounds like a conversation that goes like this:
"Wow, Lee was likely killed by someone who knew him, another tech entrepreneur."
"Yeah, and San Francisco sure has a lot of problems with homeless people."
Huh? Discussions about SF's homeless problem are pretty irrelevant to the case at hand. And it's really showing of people's biases that, when we first heard of Lee's death, the evidence-free, go-to narrative was that he obviously was killed by a random mentally-ill homeless person.
This is not bias. You don’t know in advance what the cause of an event is for sure. People mentioned a probable cause (violent homeless) and it happened to be a less probable one (a tech co-worker), although we still don’t know for sure yet. In particular, the influence of drugs and mental illness among the homeless were thought to explain the event.
It’s like predicting the price of a stock that didn’t come true. Not every incorrect prediction is due to selection bias.
I'm personally not into incarcerating mass amounts of people, as it only centralizes a prison industrial complex. Rather, one glaring issue is dangerous drugs showing up on our streets & the conditions that lead to this usage. In the comment you linked to, I noted Kensington Ave in Philadelphia, where there are videos of many people on hard drugs stooped over. Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets. Note that the reason why drugs are showing up on the streets are not random acts of mere petty criminals but involve people in domestic government & foreign governments. Rick Ross & the crack epidemic detail the history of how intelligence agencies create the conditions of mass addiction.
While some, including me, think this drug problem is an example of the hypocrisy of NeoLiberalism...I also think it's a centuries old playbook of wreaking havoc on whole populations of people by introducing vices such as drugs. The Opium Wars & what lead to the Opium Wars is an example.
Side note, I would like there to be a graph based form of communication that can better express the context of statements. It's too easy to take a couple of sentences on a forum out of context.
> Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets.
I don't know about you but I don't know anyone who fell into drug use and homelessness who had happy lives. I think people who are homeless and or addicted to drugs are addicted to drugs because there lives are not good. If you improve economic and social conditions for people, drug abuse becomes less of a problem because people do not need to cope with difficulty in their life in the same way.
I dont know of any people who are happier addicted to hard drugs than not addicted to hard drugs. If the supply of hard & tainted drugs increases, then people with addictions are more likely to increase their consumption of these drugs.
The problem & solution space involves more than just enforcement. A root cause is the ineffectiveness & corruption in social safety net programs including housing, drug treatment, & other domains. Not saying we should not have any programs but the ineffectiveness with increasing budgets speaks for itself. Effective & efficient programs should be rewarded while ineffective & inefficient programs should be discontinued.
Government agencies which engage in harmful activities such as drug trafficking should be reformed or disbanded. I don't expect the status quo to change, as we didn't get into this mess with rational institutions, but its worthwhile to have a sober view of root causes to at least put pressure on the institutions to be more rational.
I suspect a lot of our problems are caused by high-functioning addicts who are unhappy/dysfunctional and use addictions of all kinds to compensate - and who also happen to hold positions of real power and influence.
That sounds unlikely to me. Instead, I think a lot of society's problems are caused by sociopaths in positions of power. People like Putin and Trump didn't become the monsters they are because of additions or drugs, they were born that way.
What does that have to do with neoliberalism? Also, you'll have to say which presidents you see as being responsible. Wikipedia says Trump was neoliberal, I've seen it applied to other presidents. Trump was impactful on the world because he was so ineffectual in general. But I think every president in living memory wanted to reduce drug use and the supply of drugs coming into the us. In a free society it's hard to stop people from doing what they want, even if they take drugs that hurt them, kill them, or might not do anything bad (like pot), large numbers of people can supply enough demand to overcome the impact of law enforcement.
Of course fentanyl is a society destroying thing, the impact of that and things like heroin lead to me not knowing what to do personally to stop this. Media reports claim fentanyl components are coming from China. So now what?
First, I take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to politics or anything remotely related to politics.
All I'm saying is that the results speak for themselves. The drugs come from somewhere. The drugs are allowed in somehow. Repeat violent criminals are somehow let out of prison.
Also, there is a history of collusion of governments, government agencies, NGOs, & drug trafficking. This spans over hundreds of years & there are recent cases. Watch a documentary of how Compton, CA was once a working class neighborhood with industrious people, then the CIA trafficked drugs in that neighborhood (note Freeway Rick Ross), & it quickly devolved into violent gang warfare. Now the land is being bought on the cheap. Note Sofi Statium, which is built on the ground of what were once homes.
I don’t understand why it can’t be both: SF is degenerating when it comes to random crime AND this murder wasn’t by some random thug.
Always important to reflect on whether stances like "SF is degenerating" are based on a rational analysis of what is actually happening, versus a more emotional response to stories that might be more like the topic of this post, just with less visibility into the exact circumstances of what happened.
Not saying that's likely happening here, but the clear response to the original news was that this was the perfect example of what SF is becoming. How often does that assumption happen?
I've seen SF degenerating with my very own eyes and smelled it with my very own nose. Yes, this particular case may or may not be (we don't have jury decision yet) part of this pattern. But no amount of "akshually, this carefully picked statistic clearly shows that the crime is much better than it was in 1980s!" is going to change how I felt when I went to SF and how my eyes watered from the urine stench when I tried to ride BART in the city. Call me irrational as much as you want - but this is what being there felt lately, and it's obvious it is not only my personal point of view.
I don't live in San Francisco. I can't tell you exactly what is going on in the ground, so I don't know who is right here.
However, this comment is falling into the exact situation that OP was trying to warn about. You are using an anecdote to dismiss statistics because the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true. It is after all your own personal experience. However, that experience might not be an accurate representation of reality. OP warned to keep that in mind. Your response is effectively saying "no, my emotional narrative feels true so I'm sticking with it."
Maybe you are right and your emotional narrative is true. As I said, I don't know. But I'll tell you if one side of a debate has statistics and the other side has feelings, I think it is smart to side with the side that has statistics.
City-wide statistics seem almost entirely meaningless in these contexts. Most violent crime is concentrated in specific parts of the city where the people who participate in these debates never go. A 10% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city could cancel out a 10x increase in the areas where most HN people would likely be living in.
Don't forget, there's different kinds of crimes with different visibilities.
So there could be a 50% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city, along with a 500% increase in non-violent or petty crimes everywhere else: shoplifting, parked car smash-and-grabs, urinating in the train stations, pooping on the sidewalks, etc. So the tech crowd isn't going to notice fewer people getting murdered in the worst section of town, but they'll definitely see the other stuff.
I can't tell what point you are trying to make. Are you suggesting that while crime overall is down, this new situation is actually worse because the victims are now likely to have more money than past victims?
He is putting more emphasis on his direct experience than in statistics that are undoubtedly cherry-picked and potentially unreliable (by both political extremes). That's not buying into an emotional narrative; that's doing a reality check.
The direct experience of a single person has almost no value when assessing a problem as big as crime rates. It would be like saying cancer rates are up because two people you know got cancer. Direct experience shouldn't be given that much weight.
Direct experience is colored by emotion. I was mugged in the Mission 10 years ago, and it felt shitty, and it took several years for me to feel comfortable walking in some areas of the city again, especially at night. But my feelings were utterly irrelevant to what actual crime rates have been in the city since then.
I agree with you that crime stats can be politicized, but it's equally sketchy to consider n=1 anecdotes as more reliable indicators. Certainly if you yourself experience or are the victim of crime at some particular rate and intensity, then that's suggestive to you, personally. It's entirely logical to make decisions about your own life -- like moving to a safer neighborhood, or avoiding areas in the city where you've experienced crime -- but it's not particularly useful when talking about the city as a whole, or in making general recommendations to residents on how to be safe.
Aggregated year-over-year statistics are cherrypicked but his emotional experience isn't?
Ok, here's my not cherrypicked experience: The issue is massively overblown. It's nowhere near as bad as the sour-grapes living elsewhere would have you believe.
It is a kind of reality check, but as an individual you just see a very small slice of reality, so generalizing from that in space or time is often misleading. And some people cite their personal experience as a way of shutting down debate, ie 'don't tell me about the data on X, I've seen it with my own eyes', and making lengthy impassioned speeches to sideline other points of view.
> You are using an anecdote to dismiss statistics because the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true
Statistics can be useful, not useful, or misleading. Nothing about them is inherently meaningful or valuable--it depends entirely on the question and process generating the data and statistic. GIGO applies.
Despite the meme that an anecdote isn't data, it actually is no different from data from the Bayesian point of view. It is an n=1 posterior with a prior of one's past life experiences. And many anecdotes together can be thought of as a multi-level model (if you don't believe this, just see what the methodology of many behavioral/observational studies looks like--it's collating anecdotes into "data"--including the crime statistics that you are after).
> the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true
And researchers can absolutely be emotional! A study biased by the emotions and beliefs of a researcher will produce biased results. Statistics isn't an escape hatch from human bias; it actually compounds whatever bias exists in the first place.
Yes, statistics can be misleading and/or biased. Yes, multiple anecdotes become data when combined (which is even more susceptible to being misleading and/or biased). Do you think either of these things are happening in this instance? If so, make that argument. I don't think there is much value in arguing that anecdotes are generally more valuable than statistics because that obviously isn't true overall.
"Has statistics" does a lot of work here. When we weight visible dilapidation of the city against a set of figures showing some metric decreasing - a reasonable question would be how well this statistic reflects the reality on the ground. If we aggregate all crime over all the territory and get this metric to go down - does it mean we are doing great, or does it mean the crime became more concentrated in some places and now we have safe remote havens for the rich and a criminal hellscape for the less fortunate? Or does it mean we stopped reporting some things as "crime" either because the law does not care anymore or because citizens gave up on reporting it because it's useless anyway? I don't say it necessarily means that - I am just saying that you can not consider isolated metrics alone, you should always also consider how well these metrics reflect the underlying reality.
The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports. And I don't think you'll find any statistics at all on the intensity of odors in public transit stations.
In that case, statistics in all cities should be equally as error prone.
Statistics also don't collect how many annoying people are blasting shitty music on subways or how many morons are rolling coal in lifted trucks. There are unpleasant people everywhere.
> The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports.
In that case, statistics should still be useful to observe trends, if they can't be used to determine accurate absolute numbers. We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100. Say that's 20%; seeing that number change from 200 to 20 is still teaches you about how crime rates change.
Besides, we're talking about murder, here, and I would suspect that pretty much every murder ends up accounted for in the statistics. Contrary to what mafia movies would like us to believe, it's not that easy to hide a body indefinitely.
> The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports.
While urine smells certainly affect quality of life, I'm not convinced this particular statistic is all that relevant when talking about crime or public safety.
> We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100
This ignores changes in police enforcement and prosecution of crimes. If there is very little overall crime and the police have the time to find the perpetrator, and the prosecutor agrees to bring charges, you're more likely to report the crime. If there is high crime, police are too swamped to deal with yet another break-in, and the DA is too busy dropping felonies to misdemeanors or not bringing charges at all, then people aren't going to bother reporting crime as much anymore.
> In that case, statistics should still be useful to observe trends, if they can't be used to determine accurate absolute numbers. We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100. Say that's 20%; seeing that number change from 200 to 20 is still teaches you about how crime rates change.
That's definitely not true for car break-ins. In California pretty much every one I knew who lived there experienced some form of car break-in, and of course nobody got their stuff back. If I experienced one there I'd just shrug it off as a fact of life since the process of filing a police report takes time and effort, and the reward is expected to be zero.
In other places with fewer break-ins, I will most likely respond differently.
How long have you lived here? What were the conditions when you arrived, versus what you see now? What areas do you frequent?
Have you ever made friends with a homeless person? Do you know anyone who has been homeless in the past?
In my ~20y in SF, I have seen the exact same issues and political divides repeat over and over. There are certainly issues which need to be addressed, but the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration constantly leads to the reimplementation of solutions that do not work, particularly homeless sweeps and policing of nonviolent property crime.
Real solutions take time, commitment, dedication, and engagement from and with the community, not just shouting at a handful of politicians. That isn’t gratifying enough for most people, who want to see some overnight transformation, which is what leads to homeless people being shifted around from block to block based on who most loudly demands that seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.
Further, this strategy prolongs and ingrains people being stuck on the street. Having access to the resources that help people get off the street, heal from addiction, and not be so desperate as to engage in petty property crime for survival makes everyone safer, including the folks currently living on the street. Being able to establish semi-stable communities (“encampments”) where they can rely on each other to watch their property, often including medications, identifying paperwork, treasured possessions like family photo albums which keep them tethered to reality, is key to seeing them improve.
This is the strategy upon which navigation centers are built, and while not perfect, it works for a lot of people.
The, “tough on crime, I don’t want to see the homeless”, strategy which has continually failed for decades actually, counterintuitively to many people - esp newcomers’ - perception, makes us all less safe. If there has been a decline in SF since you’ve moved here, it is almost certainly because of these wasteful, costly, and dangerous approaches to public safety and health.
It doesn’t matter how many condo towers are built, SF is never going to be a gated community. If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.
Thank you for this. I haven't been here as long as you have (13 years for me). I do feel like I've seen a "decline", especially accelerated during the pandemic. I admit that these are just my personal impressions and observations, but: increased homelessness (with many more with obvious mental-health issues), increased visible drug use, increased car break-ins. And I say this as someone who was mugged 10 years ago in the Mission, without being the victim of any crime since then (well, ok, someone broke into my garage and stole a rusty broken bicycle a few years ago, but whatever). Emotionally, I feel like my experience 10 years ago might give me the opposite view, that things have gotten better since then, but that's not what I see or feel.
I go back and forth on feelings of safety: I think in some ways I do feel less safe now than I did when I moved here, but part of that are the differences between my attitudes and lifestyle at ages 30 and 40. Logically, my risk level is probably much lower now than it was 10 years ago.
But there's also just general fear, especially when walking near someone who is screaming at the moon. Maybe that fear isn't entirely rational, but I think the fear more comes from unpredictability than anything else. A few years ago, my partner was standing on the Folsom/Embarcadero Muni platform, with 15 or so other people waiting for a train. A mentally-ill person came up onto the platform, occasionally ranting, walking past people standing there, when he, completely randomly and unpredictably, turned to someone waiting and punched him, hard, in the face (he doubled over, in pain, bleeding, his nose probably broken).
For better or worse, that incident comes to mind most of the time whenever I walk past a homeless person who seems to have mental health or addiction issues, no matter how likely or unlikely it is that they might attack me. Add on top of that the fact that police will do essentially nothing when an attack occurs, even when they witness it happen, and people know this and don't feel like they have somewhere to turn if something happens.
Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit, but I think my point is that people are afraid because they see a lot of weird, potentially dangerous things that don't fit into their view of what day-to-day life should be like, and they don't know what's going to happen to them in those situations. They hear stories -- even of isolated incidents -- like mine above, and that scares them.
I completely agree that police sweeps of tent encampments are not the answer. But I also think you're putting too nice a face on these encampments (not sure why you use scare quotes; that is literally what they are). You are almost certainly correct in what you see as the good aspects of these areas, but they also have significant downsides, as breeding grounds for drug use and other health issues.
For some out on the street, I truly believe involuntary commitment to some kind of mental health or addiction treatment center is the only real start to a solution. It can't stop there, of course: supportive housing, job training and placement, etc. is an absolute necessity. Getting someone clean and then throwing them back on the street is going to lead them right back where they were. But I'm tired of this idea that we're only allowed to help people who accept it. Refusing treatment or housing should not be an allowed option. "Tough on crime" is not the answer, but maybe some form of "tough love" is. I know California has a complicated (to put it mildly) history with forced mental health treatment, but that seems to be trotted out as an excuse to do nothing, and that's not ok either. To be clear, there are many who do want help, and accept it when offered, to varying degrees of success. But the most visible are those who have mental health and/or drug addiction issues, and asking or offering nicely often does not get us anywhere.
> the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration
Define "short term". I have first met San Francisco in 2006. I have never actually lived there (first because I couldn't afford it, then because I didn't want to) but I visited it fairly regularly, at some periods of my life almost daily. At the beginning, is was a very nice place to visit. And then at some point I realized I don't actually want to go there anymore. At which precise point over the 17 years of this history that happened is hard for me to describe, but I can clearly see the contrast between where we started and where we ended up. It may be that living there all the time feels differently - I only have my perspective to it.
> seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.
This is really an unfair take, designed to shame the complainer rather than address the complaint. You are fully aware that the problems with SF go way beyond "seeing the poor" and that people that complain do not complain about "seeing the poor". Yes, people that cause these complaints are often poor - nobody would complain much about seeing a billionaire strolling through Market street - but pretending like them being "poor" is the sole basis of all the complaints is clearly not taking any of it seriously and just trying to blame the messenger. I guess it worked so well the last 15 years, keep doing it.
> is key to seeing them improve.
How has it been improving lately?
> strategy which has continually failed for decades actually
Yeah, true socialism has never been tried yet. Except SF didn't do anything like that for "decades" - the visible homelessness has been steadily increasing, and the enforcement of property crime has been steadily decreasing, to the point that it has been effectively legalized now.
> If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.
Well, that's pretty much what I did. Except where I live there's no need for gates - it's safe enough without them. And also clean enough. I hope one day it will be the same way in SF, at least as it was where I first met it 17 years ago, or better - but it's a hope beyond hope, because right now I witness people of SF doubling down hard on "how dare you to complain, you snobby rich fuck? Just smell the poop and shut up!" and "we need to legalize even more crime and do even less enforcement and then it surely will all work". Well, I guess we'll see how it will work out for you.
"Akshually", pretty much any statistic you can find shows that crime is in SF is much lower today than it was in the 1980s.
I've lived in SF for 13 years, which I know is not as long as many others, but I agree that quality of life has declined, at least in the time I've been here. But quality of life and crime rates are not the same thing. Certainly, increasing crime -- especially violent crime, but also property crime -- can decrease quality of life. But quality of life can be hurt by things that you can't easily qualify as worse crime: increased homelessness and drug use, especially when those things are much more visible and in-your-face, as they have been here. The smell of urine and having to step over human poop is a quality-of-life issue, not a crime issue.
And yes, while I assume peeing and pooping on sidewalks is at least a misdemeanor, drawing a direct line from that to "I'm gonna get assaulted or murdered" is the stretchiest of stretches.
But still, I totally get why all this stuff makes people feel less safe, even though the city (aside from a few neighborhoods that people should avoid, just like in nearly every other city in the world) on the whole is actually pretty safe, including when compared with decades ago.
But let's not conflate quality-of-life issues with crime. They are certainly intertwined in many ways, but they are not the same thing.
> But quality of life and crime rates are not the same thing.
True. But if you say "shoplifting is not a crime anymore" and then citizens say "I am not going to report my car getting broken into because what's the use?" - then yes, crime rate statistics on these drops like a stone, but did we really improve anything here?
These threads about public pooping and open drug use show that a lot of people seem to equate their feelings of discomfort with feelings of danger. Just because something is upsetting to see doesn't mean it's dangerous. I've seen people relieving themselves on the sidewalk and have never once thought that they were a danger to me or my family. It's gross, but seeing gross things never injured anyone.
Did you read what I wrote? My entire post was about how quality-of-life issues and crime/safety issues are not the same thing.
While stepping over poop or smelling urine on the street doesn't hurt me, it doesn't exactly make me happy to live here either.
(Fortunately I moved out of SoMa and into a nicer neighborhood a few years ago, so I don't have to deal with sidewalk piss and shit on a daily basis anymore.)
Curious -- how much time have you spent elsewhere in the western world in recent years? I don't mean small towns in the midwest, I mean other cities of similar size and economic importance. I suspect you'll find that San Francisco isn't really special, and, in fact, the problems facing SF are facing most of the world, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
Interestingly, there's strong correlative evidence that wealth inequality is linked to increased crime in developed nations. So that's a fun fact!
I'm not the person you're responding to but I believe the point is that people leaving, doesn't make Bay Area degeneration a fact. Only actual Bay Area degeneration, can make Bay Area degeneration a fact. We need to know who is moving, who is coming in, the economics of the region, geological suitability to population demands, needs of the larger state and nation as it relates to the region. And on and on and on.
A blog post about a guy who didn't like the dog poo in the Mission is not nearly enough data to draw the conclusions most of us were drawing. That includes myself. But after the glaring intellectual lapses I engaged in subsequent to the Asian mass shootings and the killing of the crypto exec, the inner me is attempting to reassert rational order by demanding intellectual honesty and logic. All of which is now firmly demonstrating to me that facts don't care about feelings, and will gleefully bite you in the ass if they don't align with the world view or narrative that you're emotionally comfortable with.
Just because an economist wrote a utilitarian calculus saying "this is what makes a city great" doesn't make it so. The logic they use to define "good" ultimately has, at it's deepest core a morality. The morality that "longevity is good" "per capita GDP good", "average happiness good" ... is not an objective fact and has no bearing on how human beings measure greatness. The anesthetized bug-brained western homo-economicus would probably be laughed at by a Spartan warrior ... is one objectively a "better" human than the other?
> We need to know who is moving, who is coming in, the economics of the region, geological suitability to population demands, needs of the larger state and nation as it relates to the region. And on and on and on.
Exactly. And it turns out we know the answer: California has been hemorrhaging residents for 30 years and they are overwhelmingly lower-income, albeit with a recent surge in higher-income departures which correlates with the shift to remote work.
The issue is not that "it can't be both". I personally think SF does have a serious crime problem that is not being properly addressed.
But all the comments, tweets, etc immediately came out blaming SF government and SF's general crime problem specifically for Bob Lee's death. Like they couldn't just wait a teeny bit before forming an opinion after more facts were known? Especially from the crowd that prides itself on "logic" and "data driven" decisions.
The nature of the random crime is very different from violent crime. People were saying violent crime is the issue, and here was the proof, the turning point. All demonstrably false.
You point out the falsity and people call you naive and say it's the crime stats that are wrong, not their take. Their version is reality.
As a San Francisco resident, I don't want us wasting time, energy and resources going after the wrong problems.
Sure. However the "lack of safety" perception is real too.
If a homeless person walks up to you and aggressively threatens you as you are passing by, no crime has occurred. But if you're an SF native, you've learned to shrug it off as a commonplace occurrence. You've learned to become thick skinned towards these incidences. And when a real crime has happened, you'd likely assign more gravitas to it.
This is why there is a disconnect between numbers and quoted statistics and how people feel.
>If a homeless person walks up to you and aggressively threatens you as you are passing by, no crime has occurred.
Depending on what they say, isn't that still technically "assault"? Or "disturbing the peace"?
Also, if there's poop all over the sidewalks, those are all crimes too.
The problem is that all these petty crimes are generally never reported, and certainly not acted upon by police. So they never show up in the crime statistics.
There's a disconnect between the numbers and quoted statistics and reality, because the statistics come from the police, and their reporting isn't accurate. It isn't accurate anywhere of course, because police aren't perfect and many crimes go unreported for various reasons, but to SF natives, it may seem that this is worse in SF than other places, or in SF in earlier times.
Yeah, that's exactly my point. Even if the worst violent crimes are down (murder etc.), if general incivility has gone way, way up, that usually doesn't show up in crime statistics.
According to the chart, the current homicide rate is about 7/100,000. I found a spreadsheet showing homicides going back to 1849. The rate between 1968 (happy birthday to me) and 1996 is significantly higher than now, bouncing around between 10 and 20. Between 1920 and 1967, it bounces around between a low of 2 (1938) and 9. The 1870s were another relatively high period.
Interestingly, San Francisco's population declined from 775,000 in 1950 to 679,000 in 1980.
Possibly an all-time low. It's hard to compare numbers >40 years old, because they very possibly are not measuring the same things.
As to ease when you "start extremely high" -- SF is now safer, when it comes to violent crime, than most major cities in the US. What it does have is an extremely high rate of quality of life crime.
Since the victim lived in Miami most recently, a lot of people writing about this case commented about crime statistics and it seemed to me that based on the data, Miami is a more dangerous place than San Francisco, with more murder, rape, assault, etc.
I think where to draw the line is this "undesirable place" business. That's highly subjective, judgemental, and can cause you to lose sight of a lot.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there: "undesirable place" can come from a lot of reasons. Sure, I think SF has become more undesirable due to the increase in visible homeless population (visibility most driven by the mentally ill and addicted, as well as the tent encampments), as well has rampant visible drug use.
But I think the belief/feelings that this translates to much worse crime is just not correct. I can sympathize and agree with the idea that homeless and drug problems makes SF less desirable, but I don't think it moves the needle that much on safety and crime.
It's interesting that you say that, because I had no knowledge of the relation to Miami (it's tough to tell what you meant by that comment).
The only reason I said this, is because I was there for Miami Music Week, and they had multiple shootings two years in a row. It also has a bit of a reputation from the "cocaine cowboys" years. Honestly, the city had a bit of a "feel" to it, but it also seemed to have a great amount of character.
I'm not really passing judgement myself. I live in a place that many people would call "undesirable", and it does hurt... it's also not really fair, because it's a beautiful city with rich culture heritage, and continuing culture.
However, we have lots of shootings here too, and I understand why people are a little apprehensive.
I'm sure it has nice spots and you can make a good life for yourself. However, I can assure you that historically, it's exactly that (though maybe not undesirable)
It's all about whatever world view or narrative makes us feel emotionally comfy these days. Calling Detroit, Baltimore and Miami war zones makes a lot of people out there feel emotionally comfortable. (And also illustrates how many of us are, fortunately, completely unfamiliar with actual war zones.)
I wouldn't put too much weight in those kinds of comments.
I get where you're coming from. However, my opinion was based on physically being there back to back years when there were multiple shootings in public places (though not at the actual shootings). That and the fact that it was extremely violent in the 80s.
I never thought the issue was violent crime. More like the constant low-level theft and public urination from the homeless, drug addicts, and mentally ill.
Maybe Bayview / Hunter’s Point / Sunnydale. But SF has never been a dangerous place. Not like Oakland or Richmond. Crime was much higher everywhere in the 80s and 90s.
you might be thinking of the pervasive non-violent crimes like people doing drugs in the bustling business and shopping districts and shitting right on the sidewalk in the same. it's long been infamous for that.
11.23 per 100K. Tusla has a higher murder rate. You're about as likely to die in an automobile crash nation wide (11.1 per 100K), and in Florida, more likely (15.4 per 100K).
IMO miami is a highly class segregated area. You really don't see the working class areas while there visiting or on vacation unless you go out of your way to see them.
Because I recently visited and two people were murdered in quick succession during spring break. They shut down Miami beach last year, due to back to back days of people shooting into crowds. In general, it just seemed wild and crazy.
I really don't understand what you're talking about.
I was nearly shot by a gang in Miami for parking in front of the wrong house with a white panel van with tinted windows. Never had such an experience in any other US city. I managed to get away after a five minute high speed chase on city streets. Cops were nowhere in sight at any point and time was of the essence so calling 911 was not an option.
Gravity is a force that attracts two massive objects. While that statement is true, it is completely irrelevant to the Bob Lee case. People using this tragedy as an excuse to flog their favorite scapegoat is disappointing.
That's why we call them scapegoats right? That's what people who scapegoat others do.
Logic, Rational Thought, Dispassionate Analysis, these are all good. And one day, all humans will hopefully practice these disciplines as a matter of course. But right now, the vast majority of people are controlled by their emotions. What do they want to be true? What do they wish to be true?
Well, that's what becomes "true". At least, true to them.
Here's a good explanation of why perceived crime increased at the same time as total crime decreased in SF with COVID. TLDR: the number of crimes decreased, but the total number of people out-and-about decreased even more. The result is if you went out-and-about you were more likely to experience a crime.
Also, not every crime is reported. Not everything bad is a crime.
Swathes of homeless living in tents is not a crime. So is being screamed at by a drugged maniac. You also won‘t see people openly shooting up or defecating on the street in these stats.
Because one topic, homelessness and its contribution to crime is irrelevant to the topic at hand, the tragic murder of a person. Yet there was a rush to link them. Why discuss them together when doing so implies a causal connection between them?
> This is a good reminder of how we gravitate towards powerful emotional narratives, which in the moment can feel absolutely true despite an utter lack of supporting facts on an individual murder case.
It seems equally weird to me that so many people are taking this anecdote as a sort of proof that San Francisco does not have a crime problem.
Focusing on individual anecdotes and swinging from one conclusion to another is the real problem. The source of this unfortunate murder shouldn’t dictate your entire view of a city’s crime problem.
Every major city has a crime problem and always has. The question is whether the situation is being blown out of proportion by sensationalist media or people with axes to grind. For a group that claims to be so rational, much of the HN crowd commenting here does seem to be averse to relying upon actual data.
> Every major city has a crime problem and always has.
This isn’t true.
The idea that cities must inherently have crime problems is a form of learned helplessness. You think they must have crime problems because it’s all you’ve ever experienced. Try visiting a city that has low crime, like Singapore or Tokyo.
> Try visiting a city that has low crime, like Singapore or Tokyo.
Singapore's lower crime rate is achieved by having a nanny-state government run by an autocrat, with cruel, harsh punishments for fairly low-level offenses and little care for due process. If that's what is required to get us low crime, then I will reluctantly accept higher crime rates.
Tokyo is absolutely not a low-crime city. The Japanese authorities try to paint it as such, and deal with problems quietly. News outlets don't report on much of the crime that goes on; I'm not sure why, but a reasonable guess might be due to pressure from authorities. But I assure you there's plenty of crime (especially organized crime) to go around in Tokyo; it's just not very visible.
Japan also has a near-100% conviction rate, not because they're always right, but because they value clearing cases off their books more than ensuring justice is served. The US justice system is far from perfect, but I prefer what we have here over Japan's.
I don't think many of us would sign up for bringing the Singaporean or Japanese criminal justice systems to the US. Both places have very little due process and Singapore's police have near-unlimited surveillance powers with very little judicial oversight, not sure about Japan.
Ah yes, low-crime Tokyo, where there are definitely no problems with organised crime, standover tactics in bars, construction companies using thugs to drive people out of homes, or a plethora of other well-documented problems.
Anecdotally whenever I hear a SF resident say the "crime problem is overblown", they almost always live in the nicer areas where there's virtually no crime. I lived on the border of the Tenderloin years ago, and saw things that I've never seen anywhere else. I knew a guy who was murdered in the Polk Gulch, I had my car broken into (and rummaged through multiple times after I started leaving the door unlocked), I had to physically assert myself with my friend to not seem like a target when a man brandishing a metal rod was eyeing us suspiciously, I stepped on a used hyperdermic needle which pierced my shoe but luckily did not prick me ... this is only what comes to mind at the moment as a write this, but I'm sure there's more incidents I experienced that I could conjure after some reflection. Is my experience anecdotal? Sure, but I lived it. Your experience with the city has likely been a much better one, free from such disturbing experiences. Does that mean I didn't experience this though? Or that it is "overblown"?
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.
Yes I believe all these things, but that would be true in any other big city in the US. Try living in the bad areas of Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, or Cleaveland. When San Francisco has article after article saying crime is "out of control" yet no one is writing articles about Alabama or Louisiana which objectively have higher murder rates, I would say, yes it is "overblown".
I think the question is: where did you move in New York? When you were in SF, you chose to live in/near the worst neighborhood in the city. I assume when you moved to NY, you moved somewhere a bit nicer? Do you truly believe NY has no "bad areas" that you should avoid?
This doesn't excuse the crime in the Tenderloin, but when people talk about the SF crime problem being overblown, they mean to say that there is an expected level of crime in most cities, and SF's level of crime is no worse than many others, despite what some people would like to believe.
That doesn't mean the crime in the Tenderloin is ok! But it's important to put things in context, and decide if SF is doing better or worse than other comparable cities in dealing with crime. Stats seem to point to the idea that SF is doing ok in that regard. That doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't do better, but it does mean that the sky is not falling, and there's no reason for extreme panic over SF's crime rate.
Anecdotally whenever I hear a SF resident say the "crime problem is overblown", they almost always live in the nicer areas where there's virtually no crime.
As someone who has lived in moderate-to-high crime areas for more of my life than not, most people who express a fear of crime are even less willing to listen to data-informed analyses supplemented with first hand experience, often behaving as if they're worried it might be contagious.
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.
It seems like it might be instructive to compare your current happiness with the rhetoric of Marjorie Taylor Greene who visited recently to show support for Donal Trump and followed up with an online tirade about how 'repulsive' she found NYC.
Not every city has the same crime problems. Stealing in Tokyo will get you thrown out of the country. Stealing in SF is acceptable and will get you praise.
Not surprising. You're on a forum full of techies and tech execs. It's like the people in Hollywood incredulous that #metoo movement was a thing because "they didn't know anyone like that!" until their coworkers and friends were outed.
Same here - techies shocked, _shocked_ that one of "their own" could commit a crime like this. Easier for them to talk about crime in general than lay blame at the feet on one of "their own".
What was surprising to me is that everyone seemed to move in mass that this was some "random stabbing". Random murders are exceptionally rare. What bothered me is this was another high profile murder of someone involved in crypto. There were a dozen murders that fit the bill that happened last year, and seemed way more likely.
The guy was stabbed in Rincon Hill. I don't consider that a crime ridden area.
I never believed the original assumption in stories. I am skeptical of what I read. Random murders are very rare. He was running a crypto company. Crypto space has plenty of shady things and people.
Same. The minute I read he was wandering about at 230am on a weekday I knew something was fishy. Despite how much reactionary tough-on-crime dorks want you to feel - homeless people rarely commit random murders of non homeless people.
Then like you said - the minute I found out he was in crypto I was 100% convinced he was murdered by someone he knew. Not in any conspiracy view like the feds did it because his company was "too dangerous" to FedNow or something. But because a significant portion of people in crypto are unhinged.
You would think the mass shootings of Asians would have taught us a lesson. But we all continue to jump the gun.
I think more generally, people are mob parrots at heart. We go with the crowd. If we see a guy killed and someone yells, "Crime Wave!!!" Well, then we all start chanting "Crime Wave!!!" The average person, even on HN as we saw, can really not be trusted to give dispassionate analysis. In the vast majority of instances, we just parrot whatever narrative or world view we feel most emotionally comfortable with.
I struggle mightily against it and still fall into that cesspool of intellectual laziness from time to time. It's just human. But you're right. We need to do better.
I got downvoted at the time, but Bob was heavily involved in launching Cash app which was exposed a few weeks ago as having inflated numbers to investors and been grossly negligent in policing their users many of whom were using the platform for crime. It's entirely possible that Lee was either mixed up with bad actors and/or pissed off some bad actors by providing details for the story. Obviously this is speculation too but it seems at least as plausible as it being truly random.
As much as I don't like SF's progressive politics, the data showed that the recalled SF DA Boudin didn't charge less on murders or narcotics: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/We-obtained-never-.... Boudin did charge less on theft and burglary.
In the future, it may be helpful to remember that murder and violence — especially sexual violence — are oddly intimate things,
In 2011, in incidents of murder for which the relationships of murder victims and offenders were known, 54.3 percent were killed by someone they knew (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend, etc.); 24.8 percent of victims were slain by family members. The relationship of murder victims and offenders was unknown in 44.1 percent of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents in 2011.
In short, people were killed by strangers 11.7% of the time. For 88.3% of murders (where the relationship between the killer and the victim was known), it was someone the victim knew.
The statistics are similar for sexual violence.
For juveniles and children who experience sexual violence, it is a family member of acquaintance 93% of the time. This percentage drops for adults to ~80%, i.e. in 80% of cases the victim will know the perpetrator.
These crimes are very different from a mugging or robbery. It is easy to imagine why if you replay the situation in your mind — looking someone in the eyes as you stab them, up close takes a lot emotionally. It is a very intense situation. Almost everyone — if driven to it — will steal out of desperation and hunger, but very few can look people in the eye, walk up to them and stick a knife in them. There is a strong psychological aversion to hurting other human beings built into most of us and it's what keeps society mostly safe.
This is a bad take and itself an emotional narrative. For one, the person arrested is a suspect and not in any way proven or admitted to be the killer. Putting that aside, it's still a bad take because you're ignoring the many other incidents that took place on the same day, such as the SF Fire Commissioner who was beaten with a metal pipe by random drug users outside his house.
the SF Fire Commissioner who was beaten with a metal pipe by random drug users outside his house
Former fire commissioner, not outside his house (actually a parent's home), and what makes you so sure it was random? A man was arrested for that, who alleges that the victim initiated the confrontation by pepper spraying him. I'm quite interested in that case as I have relevant personal knowledge about people involved, but for that reason I'm reluctant to draw any conclusions about it for now.
I said random because I haven't heard of anything linking the attacker and the commissioner beyond that the attacker was homeless and camped near the house.
> who alleges that the victim initiated the confrontation by pepper spraying him.
The reports I have seen state that the attacker claims the victim sprayed him with bear mace, not pepper spray. Regardless of this - and other minute points that don't matter - the subsequent footage of the attack shows the commissioner turning his back to and running away from the attacker, who quickly gives chase. It doesn't matter who started it; there's no justification for continuing the assault in such a situation.
So, the lesson here is not to jump to global far-reaching conclusion based on one single case, and the reason why it is so important is because of this one single case from which we can totally make a global far-reaching conclusions...
The emotional narrative that was initially gravitated toward is in fact correct.
Had there not been the entrenched environment of lawlessness in SF the perpetrator would not have even attempted his attack. And had the victim not been a prominent person the SF police would not have bothered to keep looking.
The only mistake the murderer made here is he underestimated the public outcry that forced the police and the DA to keep investigating in fear of theirs and the city's reputation.
Maybe it's time to stop paying attention to what Elon Musk and other so-called "tech industry" people publish on the internet. These are not journalists and it is not "news". It's garbage.
Maybe it's time to wake up.
One can only imagine what these two "tech industry" people were arguing about before one killed the other. The media reports make them sound like such wonderfully nice people, drinking and driving around SF at 2am on a Tuesday, one of them liking stay out to the wee hours on weeknights the other liking to keep butterfly and switch blades in his car. One of them apparently believed an "emotional narrative" about SF being in decline; that's allegedly why he moved to Miami.
Here is the Expand IT Inc. website, listing the survivor's colleagues.
The SF-is-a-hellhole narrative is compelling, but the report that Lee was not the victim of a random crime shouldn't have been surprising. The FBI says 40+% of murders are committed by a family member or acquaintance, and 10% by total strangers:
fwiw, there are two SF-is-a-hellhole narratives, and this turn of events reflects differently through the prism of each:
- narrative A (looking "up"): where the upper-class technologists are the reason for the social precarity-based hellscape experienced by the lower-class residents
- narrative B (looking "down"): where the crime of the lower-class is the cause of the fearful crime-based hellscape experienced by the upper-class technologists
The reality is probably a little bit of both. But in typing this, I'm realizing that I should probably try to avoid sensationalizing the topic with references to "hell" (though I realize you were using that phrase to dismantle the sensationalism, not escalate it)
Everyone is a victim of this stuff, not just the upper class. Poor people getting to work having their car windows smashed multiple times is a serious issue. But the constant drumbeat of property crime, dirtiness, and leud acts in public it gets downplayed because the murder rate is less than it was during some prior horrible time in the city's history and people feel some need to defend their own city (and the particular sort of politics it's famous for).
Yep, people haven't been complaining about murders. It's almost entire the property crime and general lawlessness. This murder just gave people the opportunity to whine about the plight.
A lot of it is about the unique culture of this city, which has been both gleaming boomtown and garbage-strewn opium den since, oh 1848. It's always been a place where you do your own thing on the street and no one bothers you, which is why thousands die of overdoses while people walk around them without getting their Allbirds dirty. We need to take better care of each other.
That leaves 50% in the unknown category. Who knows whether those other 50% have the same distribution as the knowns? It's also possible that most of the unknowns are stranger murders since the offender might be harder to identify in those cases.
So, the ratio is somewhere between 10% stranger to 90% family and acquaintance and 60% stranger to 40% family and acquaintance.
Here's a 1977 NYT story [0] during a time in which there were many more murders and the stranger-rate nationwide was estimated at 20%:
- 1,622 homicides
- 1,246 where (known vs. stranger) relationships were established
- 354 of that 1,246 attributed to strangers
Today's clearance rate is lower [1], but it's not really apples-to-apples comparison for a lot of reasons relating to recordkeeping conventions. But clearance rate for white homicide victims in NYC is still around ~85%. The past few years, the % of overall victims that were killed by strangers is around 5% [2].
So yes, there is still some uncertainty in the exact ratio of stranger/friend/unknown suspects. But still not rational to automatically assume that Lee was the victim of random crime.
This is fascinating. I live in Baltimore and follow a lot of street connected profiles as sort of an OSINT information gathering hobby. I’ve always seen on instagram where said population has RIP in their bios sometimes for 6-7 people. Really puts it in perspective that in a high homicide rate area, if you’re in the network, your risk is almost Warzone (or higher) on a per capita basis
The most fascinating thing to me is that the biggest indicator that you are going to be murdered is that you have been arrested in association with someone else who did get murdered. Police can address homicide rates by intervening in the lives of these future victims. When some low-level neighborhood criminal gets shot, go find all that guy's friends and offer them jobs in other cities.
That makes complete sense to me. Being involved in any sort of business where the underlying activity is criminal in nature means that contract disputes and even competition for market share have to be underwritten by violence and the willingness to resort to violence with no legal system to turn to for redress.
In the same way that being served with a lawsuit means likely to spending some time with lawyers or in court, a low-level criminal being shot indicates that his coworkers in the enterprise are likely to spend some time in shootouts.
They do this in Baltimore, it’s called GVRS. They find and assign risk scores (related to arrest but also some other stuff) and go seek out the person, offer them help or threaten to come down hard on them if they commit crimes
The pilot had a homicide reduction of 30% iirc but we will see over time as it expands to whole city how it plays out
Joe Eskenazi, the author of this piece, is a solid journalist who helps run the tiny donation-funded Mission Local. They've done incredible reporting on corruption in the SF city government and punch
way above their weight in the stories they break. I have respect for how Joe refused to join in reporting this murder as evidence of a violent crime epidemic, while still reporting on homelessness and property crime.
The top part of Joe Eskenazi’s earlier article https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-crazy-bob-mobilecoi... was good (where he reported evidence that the Bob Lee killing was not a robbery), but I agree with Garry Tan that the bottom part of the article (where he makes a broader commentary on whether San Francisco is “safe” unrelated to Bob Lee) is gaslighting and reductionist. It makes many claims and implications that are questionable: e.g., that rampant property crime does not make you unsafe (despite the fact that many thieves are armed), that festering drug addiction does not make you unsafe (which may have been a contributing factor to the car not stopping for the victim), that the problem with crime is “feelings” rather than real risk, and that those who are concerned about crime must have come from sheltered “suburbs”. And there’s no mention of anti-Asian robberies that got the previous DA recalled.
Eskenazi is a well-connected journalist, but he is also arrogant and often presents only one side of issues. For example, virtually nothing that he wrote in this article (anonymously sourced from disgruntled politicians) about the magnet school Lowell High school ended up being true (magnet schools do not violate state code as claimed, and the school did return to test-based admission which he claimed would not happen) https://missionlocal.org/2022/02/lowells-old-merit-based-adm.... So while his reporting is mostly good, you have to be aware of his bias.
I think you are trying to pigeonhole Eskenazi's argument into the standard "progressives don't care about crime" punditry that's popular on the right. I would suggest re-reading the column with a more open mind. His argument is that feeling safe is as important, if not more important from a policymaking perspective, as empirical measures of safety ("real risk") such as violent crime rate. He is in fact arguing the exact opposite of what you are characterizing him as arguing ("rampant property crime does not make you unsafe", "festering drug addiction does not make you unsafe"), and seems to have advised politicians to ignore these issues at their own peril.
The problem is that just like violent crime rates don't fully explain feelings of safety, things that make one feel unsafe don't fully explain all violent crime. Since Bob Lee's murder did not seem to be a result of either drug-induced psychosis or a mugging gone wrong, Joe made the correct call that the murder was likely unrelated to either of those issues.
That all being said, it appears that you have issues with him based on unrelated reporting on an issue you seem to care deeply about. A good of a time as any to examine any potential biases you might have when receiving new information so you don't accidentally embarrass yourself on Twitter!
> I think you are trying to pigeonhole Eskenazi's argument into the standard "progressives don't care about crime" punditry that's popular on the right. I would suggest re-reading the column with a more open mind. His argument is that feeling safe is as important, if not more important from a policymaking perspective, as empirical measures of safety ("real risk") such as violent crime rate.
From the article:
> But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low, and is lower than most mid-to-large-sized cities.
> Lee’s death, however, was packaged in the media and on social media into a highlight reel of recent San Francisco misfortunes and crimes: large groups of young people brawling at Stonestown; the abrupt closure of the mid-market Whole Foods, leaving San Franciscans just eight other Whole Foods within city limits; the severe beating of former fire commissioner Don Carmignani in the Marina District, allegedly by belligerent homeless people — it all adds up to a feeling of a city coming undone.
> This manner of coverage, however, does not capture the actual lived experience of the vast majority of San Franciscans.
I'm reading his article again.. where is his argument that feeling safe is important?
He states that violent crime is low, and that newspapers shouldn't be cherry-picking and sensationalizing how bad it is, and that he knows this is not the actual experience for the vast majority of San Franciscans.
> His argument is that feeling safe is as important, if not more important from a policymaking perspective
I’ll set aside his smear that opponents of crime come from suburbs and his strawman that those who oppose crime only want “more cops, stiffer sentences and a return to the Gov. Reagan-era incarceration of the mentally ill”.
His main argument is that by “objective” measures, San Francisco is safe and any increase in danger is only subjective “feelings”, but that “feelings” still affect tourism and politics. The first part (which is the same party line we have seen in the SF Chronicle) is the gaslighting. I want to distinguish between psychological feelings, and risk which can be real but not fully measurable. I hypothesize that for many residents, actual risk of injury, not just feelings, has increased over the past 5 years. There are many mechanisms by which risk may not show up in the citywide violence statistics. Crimes may shift from one neighborhood to another (e.g. to touristy places) or from one demographic to another (e.g. against Asians) while staying steady citywide. Armed robbers may primarily target wealthier people who give them what they want, but victims who have less to lose and resist are more likely to be attacked. Underage thieves may injure you through reckless driving instead of attacks. With fewer pedestrians commuting after COVID-19, a street that is more dangerous may get fewer violent incidents. Or victims may underreport crimes. The point is, when there are so many changes in behavior among commuters, thieves, and addicts, I don’t believe a couple citywide metrics give the whole picture.
> you have issues with him based on unrelated reporting on an issue you seem to care deeply about
That’s just the most egregious example. I learned to read Eskenazi’s articles skeptically because I often read him pushing one lazy narrative but not getting the details right or not getting the other side of the argument. Another example is this article on Proposition 22 https://missionlocal.org/2020/09/prop-22-chronicle-uber-lyft.... In it, he claims that “Airbnb and its ilk skirted paying hotel taxes for years… And they kept their money”, which is not true; Airbnb settled with the city to pay all the 15% hotel back taxes which exceeded their own 6% revenue during that time. And notice how overtly one-sided that article is; it makes no attempt to get the other side of the delivery issue and whether paying drivers who are are waiting at home with their app open makes any business sense for Uber or for taxi dispatch companies for that matter. Another example I recall is the reporting on HubHaus https://missionlocal.org/2019/08/san-francisco-rental-platfo... which claimed without evidence that the room share company was “exacerbating the already onerous cost of housing” and showed very little interest in what it would take to actually follow the definition of family, and whether the definition of family itself is what is exacerbating the housing crisis. He is good at ferreting out a certain kind of bureaucratic corruption (e.g. DBI), but he turns a blind eye to other kinds of corrupt rules that benefit incumbents that politicians like Arron Peskin (coincidentally one of his favorite sources) specialize in. In other words, he’s biased, and you often get only one side from his articles.
I know in Twitter everyone is inflammatory, however a CEO should exercise restraint and show leadership, and hold judgement until facts are clear, in this case he clearly failed.
Of course, I know better. He's too cowardly to come out and say what he's feeling, but just take a look at his likes from today. Apparently he thinks that journalist should be jailed for embarrassing him. https://twitter.com/garrytan/likes
This is a prime example of the growing stated perception outside of tech bubble, "tech bros killing each other and blaming the homeless". It didn't take long for people to start posting that.
Yes, street crime is itself a taking of rights and freedom of the people living and working in a place, and it is more important to contain it than to maximize the criminals' rights.
But this shows that the reputation of the tech industry is pretty much underwater, and premature postings like that don't help.
They really do some amazing reporting. Based on the fact that this is the first article I'm seeing on this topic, it seems that Mission Local may have got the scoop [1] on the Chronicle and other big newspapers on this high-profile topic. That is a big deal for journalists (if I recall correctly) because it means you're doing better original reporting and you're more connected to the neighborhood.
Any small local news organizations will almost ALWAYS get the scoop on the big ones, for local news. Because the vast majority of "big" news things are a division of some conglomerate and just regurgitate Reuters.
Things are worse than ever and reading comments like this that dismiss it genuinely confuses me. So because other cities have similar or worse crime rates, we should just accept it?
Urban decay is happening all across this country and it needs to be addressed aggressively before you or someone you know gets stabbed to death.
Things are not worse than ever. Things are slightly worse after the pandemic, but nowhere as bad as the 70's. Feel free to check the statistics.
Anyway I agree we need to get aggressive, but a lot of folks thinks that means more cops. We spend a hell of a lot on police, but police don't address the root causes of most crimes.
We need to aggressively invest in urban areas with new housing, job opportunities, drug treatment, gang disruption, violence interruption, mental health care, and other meaningful interventions in the cycles and circumstances that lead people to commit crime.
It's harder to depart from the median situation in a large geographical region one way or another. All else equal (which is never the case, consult a real criminologist), San Francisco probably can do more about its property crime than violent crime, under the very general principle of regression to the mean.
The local papers I am familiar with in my region are literally (not figuratively) just re-print houses for prior-approved PR stories from local schools, businesses, and government offices.
This is great writing, "the abrupt closure of the mid-market Whole Foods, leaving San Franciscans just eight other Whole Foods within city limits". What a scoop, brilliantly delivered.
It's an expression of appreciation for the author's saracastic humor, reporting on the thinness of evidence for anti-SF commentary, a major theme of the OP article.
Sure, it's a cute jab, but 8 WFs in an entire city is not that many. Even if you have a car, there are large swaths of the city (Richmond, Sunset), where a WF is a bit of a slog during regular traffic (and worse during rush hour). And of course, many city dwellers don't have cars, so having to lug groceries up SF's famously hilly streets is not great for more than a fraction of a mile or so.
The actual city of SF is not that large. Something like 800k people. Not very big of a footprint either. 8 is no small number.
Austin TX has 964K, is where Whole Foods was founded, and has 5 according to the locator on their website.
Los Angeles has almost 4M people and has 7. (As well as ones in various other cities that are intertwined with the weird geographic footprint, but also 4 times as many people in the "official" city limits for those 7.)
This seems like a good opportunity to plug SF's great independent grocers. Please do not sleep on The Good Life Grocery, Rainbow, or the several Gus' Community Market locations around town, not to mention all the other small grocers around the city.
Some more great places in my local riding area: Midtown Market in Dogpatch (pricey but really good produce), and Glen Canyon Market, which was recently acquired by Gus. A cute small grocery store with a butcher counter just opened near Portrero, and there's also Avedano's butcher on Cortland Ave (near a Good Life) and Olivier's in Dogpatch.
Swiping my hand over a mystery panel to pay for my groceries is very cool at WF, but there's no shortage of great places to restock the fridge and pantry all over SF, and where the money you spend is going more to local places and locals.
Good thing there are other groceries and farmer's markets and Prime delivery to fill the gap left by the one WF closing then. Living in the Sunset, yes it's true if I want to go to a Whole Foods I'd have to either drive, or bike or take public transit to the one over by the Haight, the one down at Stonestown mall or the one on Upper Market. But I don't usually because the Safeway is within walking distance and that's good enough for me most of the time and if not there's Other Avenues, Sunset Super, 22nd and Irving, and Gus's all relatively close by just to name a few off the top of my head.
Haight WF is about as close as Masonic Trader Joe’s (and somehow easier to park at) for most in the richmond and sunset - though Calmart is better than both.
Andronico’s was much better than both before safeway took over
If you like this article, think about subscribing to them.
Lots of little papers like this seem healthy and then unceremoniously go out of business because they don't make enough money in ad revenue to pay their journalists like 45k/yr. That's not a typo: that's how much Bay Area reporters make.
Mission Local is great. We are blessed with a wealth of local journalism like Mission Local, Cityside, even SF Standard if I hold my nose about the fact that it is controlled by a reactionary political movement. It is why I never understood the whining about "support your local newspaper". There's no chance of me ever subscribing to the Chronicle. I donate to these other, better news outlets instead.
SF Standard has some of the city’s best journalists on staff, and you’d be hard pressed to identify how Moritz is influencing their coverage decisions.
I have not heard of the SF Standard (I'm not in CA). You seem to value SF Standard (at some level) even while disagreeing with underlying political stances. That juxtaposition seem unfortunately rare in the current era, could you expand on what value they create (for you)?
SF Standard does not seem to have an overt reporting bias. So far I find their articles informative. But they are 100% funded by a PAC the agenda of which I do not fully embrace.
Given how heavily and uncritically the initial theory of a homeless/lower class person as the killer was promoted (not least of all here on HN), I think it made a lot of sense to reveal that the actual suspect now arrested worked in the tech industry and was acquainted with the victim.
Beyond that, it's nor clear to me that revealing the actual name or other personal details of the suspect serves a legitimate purpose of advancing justice or society; however, it is not out of keeping with journalistic practice in other criminal cases in California. Suspects' names get printed in newspapers for far lower profile crimes all the time.
I can see some benefit in that potential witnesses might be more likely to come forward. If I hear of a terrible crime and it turns out my neighbor was arrested for it I might potentially have some valuable information to contribute. I'm still not sure if it's a good thing though.
What a terrible comparison. There is a massive difference between identifying someone who has been charged and randomly naming brown people the killer.
In this example there is enough evidence the suspect has been arrested by police, which is a public record. Not remotely the same as the Boston bomber reddit-misidentification case.
It is every bit the same and every bit as shitty a metric. Remember Richard Jewell?
The man's only crime was being the first person to find a live bomb and help people escape it before it then detonated and killed 100+ others. The fucker was a literal goddamn hero.
But then the media implied he was a sad loser rent-a-cop who planted a bomb so he could find it and pretend to be someone important for a day. It was absolutely depraved, and that's before the FBI started harassing him.
But hey, all's fair for anyone named as a suspect by law enforcement. They always get it right the first time around. Everyone who gets arrested is later convicted. They always kick down the right door before sending the SWAT team in.
I agree, but we can't only have this discussion when someone wealthy is implicated in a crime. On any other given day the SF carceral brigade is out for blood. Just recently a prominent person was talking about bringing back lynching. So when they suddenly start waxing on about the rights of the suspects, we should absolutely press them on their change of heart.
I agree with you too, but don't think holding politicians to their lies or fixating on class warfare is really the most pressing part of the situation. He's calling for lynchings because he knows there's a receptive audience for it.
That's the part you should be most worried about, because a mob so empowered could just as easily turn its gaze to you. Good luck trying to be a nuisance to that prominent person once the mob gets a taste for blood. Before participating in doxxing frenzies or lynch mobs, nobody ever stops and thinks "what if this guy didn't actually do it?"
No expansion of the carceral state required, we'll just deputize an angry mob to play the part of Executioner.
I guess, but I see this all as connected. The person (Michelle Tandler, if you’re wondering) wasn't calling for lynching because she knew she’d get clicks. She was doing it because she thinks police are breaking the social contract: she’s a wealthy white woman, cops exist to make her feel comfortable by violently subjugating poor Black and brown people, and they’re not doing it enough for her.
So yes, vigilante justice is bad, mobs are bad. But crime is also a social construct. We literally decide what is and is not illegal - aka what is and is not “vigilante justice” — and I don’t think it’s necessarily worse to find yourself in the crosshairs of an angry mob than the crosshairs of a cabal of bloodthirsty tech execs aiming the state’s monopoly on violence at you.
> I agree, but we can't only have this discussion when someone wealthy is implicated in a crime.
We don't.
If you're serious about this, you're also responsible for not pushing for doxing of random suspects. You can't argue that there are good witch hunts and bad witch hunts.
In Germany it's not public, nor are you allowed to publish the name of a person arrested. This is to protect the individual's privacy and shield them from public retribution and prejudice, which I think is a far more enlightened stance.
In America, the stigma of an arrest follows you for the rest of your life.
I agree, especially pre-trial. I disagree post-trial. When a judgement has been made "in the name of the people", the people should be able to know the name.
But forever? Shouldn't a person who does wrong have the option to actually make things right? Should a mistake somebody makes at a young age follow them until their death, even if they have gone through the actual judicial punishment? If there's no way for them to ever "make things right" in the eyes of society, it doesn't leave many choices - which is a big contributor to the high rates of repeat criminals.
I don't think you can "make right" a murder. You can be punished for it, but that doesn't absolve you of the deed, and it shouldn't force others to forgive or accept you.
Yes, it's a tough deal, but let's be honest here: it's nothing compared to what they do to their victims. And there's really very few cases per decade that will make you a nation-wide celebrity. For the most part, moving 50km away will for all intents and purposes make you "a new man".
You can often attain forgiveness by showing regret. Many don't, which is why they aren't forgiven, and aren't happily accepted by society when they get released. Who could blame them? And why should we help them wash away their sins and treat it as a secret?
I also don't buy the excuse that recidivism is significantly driven by rejection from society. It's the easy way to explain your behavior when truth and reflection would paint a different picture, but one that's harder to accept: that we're responsible for our deeds, and (yes, with some super specific exceptions) nobody made us do them.
> You can be punished for it, but that doesn't absolve you of the deed, and it shouldn't force others to forgive or accept you.
Sure, people don't have to forgive you. But why stop at murder? Why not publish every bad thing a person does, so everyone can freely choose whether to forgive you or not? How do we decide what to publish, and what not?
> Yes, it's a tough deal, but let's be honest here: it's nothing compared to what they do to their victims.
Definitely, we don't have to compare "damage" or anything, the victims are obviously the worst off. But the question is: what is the purpose of life-long punishment? Just to make us feel warm and fuzzy that the bad people have it bad, without any consideration for the effect this has on them and consequently us?
> And there's really very few cases per decade that will make you a nation-wide celebrity. For the most part, moving 50km away will for all intents and purposes make you "a new man".
That doesn't matter in the slightest in our digital age. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, everyone around you can quickly find out what you've done if it's public information. Literally, if you told me your name, I could tell you in a couple of minutes. And this happens regularly, and is spread throughout social circles, meaning that once "the lid is off" you'll have to move another 50km to have another calm couple of weeks.
> You can often attain forgiveness by showing regret. Many don't, which is why they aren't forgiven, and aren't happily accepted by society when they get released.
How many? Is this based on statistics, or on a feeling?
> I also don't buy the excuse that recidivism is significantly driven by rejection from society. It's the easy way to explain your behavior when truth and reflection would paint a different picture, but one that's harder to accept: that we're responsible for our deeds, and (yes, with some super specific exceptions) nobody made us do them.
Actually, you're taking the easy route. Putting everything on personal responsibility removes any responsibility from you for the decision to punish them for life, and consequently the actions they take due to your decision. It's nice that you don't buy the excuse, but studies show time and time again that this is a big factor, especially if you compare the American legal system with more developed nations.
So you're making decisions for which we know there will be bad consequences, but your hands are clean, since you didn't do it directly! But usually people develop past this view of morality and recognize that you're not just responsible for what you do directly, but also for what your decisions lead to.
I don't know how other countries handle this, but I learned a few years ago, somewhat to my surprise, that Switzerland has in some cases provided a high profile murderer with a new identity after they served their sentence, precisely so they could go on with their life: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günther_Tschanun
if a politician is arrested on corruption charges, are you not allowed to name them? or if someone's spouse is arrested for their murder, you can't disclose it? or that the suspect is, say, a tech worker rather than a homeless person? how can you possibly cover high-profile crimes if you're not allowed to disclose facts about the suspects?
In America most people are never declared guilty by a judge, they get held in jail until they give up and agree to the prosecutor declaring them guilty instead.
Juries, not judges, declare people guilty in the US. Prosecutors don't declare people guilty either; what you're talking about is people taking a plea bargain and pleading guilty. Bail reform can help take the pressure off of people to falsely confess to get out of jail, and we need more of it.
that exposes quite a lot more information than I expected, given OP's description of how the privacy laws work. it includes the suspects' ages, backgrounds and (very distinctive) first names. it took me a mere second to find their full names by Googling - there's not many 71-year old noblemen named "Heinrich XIII"!
so I guess it's a figleaf? good for them, I guess?
It’s fundamental to the principles of habeas corpus that the overwhelming power of the government to arrest, prosecute, and imprison someone be wielded in broad daylight.
The UK is a good example of a generally* similarly free country without guaranteed public access to arrest records. This balances the potential benefit to the public from knowing against the definite harm to the accused.
(*There are definitely significant ways each is less free than the other and there's no rigorous way to say which is worse)
I think the person you're replying to is saying that:
- If a government arrests someone, it should be forced to acknowledge both that it happened AND give the reason for arrest
- Media should have the right to report on arrests, without interference from the government.
This protects from abuses of power against for example political opponents. Of course, these same laws make arrests for common crimes problematic for the people being arrested. And I don't think it is feasible to codify an objective line between the two.
Yes, it's a balance. I don't want my government hustling people into vans and disappearing, but I don't want minor indiscretions to become media-amplified scarlet letters, either.
A reasoned discussion begins with an acknowledgment that the public has a right to monitor its government, and that individuals have a right to privacy. Unfortunately, the USA PATRIOT Act substantially dimmed the sunlight on government law-enforcement activity, and the Dobbs decision severely weakened privacy as an emergent constitutional right.
Edit: As I was writing this reply, I came up with an interesting legal theory. The right to publicity is traditionally understood as a celebrity's right to control the commercialization of his or her image. Might we say that the modern attention economy has turned everyone into a potential celebrity, and thus that everyone should be allowed to control the commercial publicity of their persona? This would draw a potentially meaningful line between the public's right to know (which I expect is popular) and the media's right to commercially exploit the salacious details of an accused's crime (which is, sadly, extremely popular; otherwise, it wouldn't be as prevalent as it is today). I'm sure attorneys and legal scholars have already explored this idea.
People get arrested, their name smeared, presumed guilty, and then go to trial and it wasn't them. Lives get ruined over for crimes not committed.
IIRC, Israel doesn't publish arrests, just convictions. So it's not a new idea.
Florida's "sunshine law" mandates arrests be public record, and it's lead everyone to believe there's more crazy people in Florida than anywhere else, which just isn't true.
Sure we shouldn't have black sites where people just get nabbed and disappeared either, but "guilty until proven innocent" is just a fancy idea if your life gets ruined before the trial. Look at what happened to Rittenhouse. Kicked out of his college and then "not guilty on all counts" at trial. It's a miscarriage of justice.
1. Police secretly arrest people and toss them in jail never to be heard of again
2. People are erroneously arrested, there name is publicly attached to a crime through a bunch of reporting, then they're released before trial or found not guilty
The first is fairly clear, the 2nd is a problem because being released is generally not news, so google search or whatever forever links the persons name to a crime they didn't do. Then you have a bunch of humanisms: the person the lawyered there way out of the crime, or "they must have been involved otherwise why would they be arrested", etc. So there is a permanent cost to being publicly arrested for something you didn't do even if justice happens and you don't ever see court. That's why you some times see people in the judicial system releasing "this person is absolutely innocent" type press releases.
It's hard to believe that you're not aware the name is published by the police following an arrest, which was almost certainly the subject of a warrant application.
What? What has the race and the finances have to do with anything? He's not white, he's of Iranian descent I believe. The LinkedIn is still online. Even tho I disagree with doxing someone that might turn out not to be the victim.
I don’t know anything about Mission Local, but
reading of the article prior to reading your comment left me with the impression that the author was really invested in this being a targeted killing. The first part of the article started strong, and then it felt like the author was grinding a political axe, though I’m sure it’s in response to other articles grinding different axes. It was a well-written article to be sure, but I guess I’ve grown weary of motivated journalism.
Looks like the author had very good reason to think that this was a targeted killing, as in, if the suspect did it it was a targeted killing.
Jumping to the conclusion that some homeless guy or street thug did it, without any evidence, is also something that people with axes to grind do on a regular basis.
I’m not disputing that the killing was targeted; like I said, the first part of the article (which had already expressed the targeted nature pretty clearly) was solid. It was the subsequent axe grinding that I took issue with.
If you find it difficult to recognize a solid journalist in someone who uses language in a standard way that you dislike, that would be a problem with your own ability to exercise judgment.
I have walked around my city in the US for decades and can count on one hand the number of times, I have seen crime happen live and in person on our streets. In a recent single trip to SF that was just a few days, I can say I saw perhaps a half dozen active crimes. Also of note, i have seen public urination only once here, but saw it twice in between the airport and my hotel in SF.
Live where ya want and how you want, but let’s not pretend SF is no different than other places in the US. It is, and frankly it’s shocking and blows my mind that people pretend it’s normal.
Of course SF isn't normal it is the archetype for the city as an insane asylum created by Reaganomics.
But it seems SF shows that has nothing to do with the epidemic of murder in the US or it is least prevalent in leftist cities that decided to take over federal responsibilities that Reagan stopped honoring in a rather odd way.
Trying to make everything you can call one word one horrible new problem doesn't solve something. It makes people think there is some hopeless complex problem instead of many separate cause and effect incidents for unrelated things.
That's standard practice isn't it? If you get arrested for a newsworthy crime, the news will say your name while saying "alleged" to make it clear you haven't been convicted yet.
I don't think hiding the names of accused suspects is realistic. Instead, we should try to educate the public and remind them that people are still innocent until proven guilty.
Eh, there’s a reason we have a system where the accused has the right to make their case in court. An arrest is a strong signal but by design has a lower burden of proof than it takes to punish someone within the system. Given that being publicly accused of a heinous crime can do irreparable damage in the age of Google even if ultimately acquitted, I'd rather err on the side of caution here.
Am I the only one who does NOT feel unsafe in SF at all ? I mean, I choose not to walk in TL and SOMA at night. But why would anyone feel unsafe in North Beach, Marina, Russian Hill, Richmond, Sunset, GG park, Lower Haight, Valencia etc. I have spent many nights walking in Valencia and took Uber home at 2am. Doesn't feel remotely unsafe.
I've lived in SF for almost 30 years. I agree 100%. Sure, there's a lot more sad/ugly homelessness in the post-covid era. The shantytowns out by Candlestick are depressing. The Tenderloin continues to be a mess.
But do I feel less safe? Absolutely not! The neighborhoods (where most people live) are just fine. I regularly walk home from the bars at midnight without a care. It's simply not a problem.
Compare back to the mid-90's, when there was active gun/gang violence in the Mission corridor ... quite frankly, I feel far safer today than I used to.
Beautifully put. I've noticed a lot of the barometer (if you will) for gauging peoples "feelings" of safety is if you're personally scared and/or uncomfortable with just the existence of homeless people. I live DTLA - 4 blocks off skid row - and I've never felt unsafe. Uncomfortable? Sure sometimes. Disheartened by the state of one of the richest cities in the world? Absolutely. But unsafe? never.
But if you equate homeless people near me = unsafe, then that's a different discussion.
Unsafe was 80's-90's Compton crack gang wars with machine gun drive-bys.
Unsafe is the current Baltimore or south side of Chicago.
The Tenderloin isn't anything remotely like that. Sure there are dealers on the street and people hawking stolen goods at the bus stops, but there doesn't seem to be violent unsafety.
One of the reasons it feels unsafe to people is the trash scattered across the streets and sidewalks, the rundown condition of those same streets and sidewalks, and just generally rundown feel of many buildings. It's a look that reminds people of neglected neighborhoods of the city they moved here from.
Sorry if it came across that way, wasn't my intent.
I live in the city, and travel through all parts -- including the less desirable parts. I ride down Market every day. I go to the central library at Civic Center. I do bike loops through Candlestick. I frequent bars in the Tenderloin.
So no, it's not just because I can avoid "crime-ridden areas". It's because I don't find those areas fundamentally unsafe.
Thanks for calling out privilege, but I think we should assume good faith. I don't think they were trying to say that everything is good, they're just saying the narrative isn't as simple as the media is making it look.
Depends on what media you're reading I suppose. Quite a lot of it paints SF is a city of haves and have-nots which fits nicely into the above poster's experience.
I've lived in a lot of places with, in many states, in many countries, all with different population densities and economic diversity... and that statement holds true for all of them.
One of these days the sheer weight and remaining shelter of class consciousness will break through the cognitive dissonance. One of these days.
“ A privilege is a certain entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis”
Nowhere on the planet is "perfectly safe" so no one is saying about that SF. Positive sentiment is probably in the middle ground you're asking for, whereas negative sentiment literally uses "dystopian hellhole".
No, you're not the only one. While I don't like the depressing level of homelessness, mental illness, and drug addiction, I generally haven't felt nearly as unsafe as people always play up. If there's a volatile situation around, GTFO, and don't walk in dark neighborhoods at night, de-escalate, that kind of thing helps a lot of course.
Also, why do we never factor gun violence into these conversations about safety? In SF there are relatively few people walking around strapped. I looked it up, and in my hometown of Louisville, KY (which is no Detroit or Baltimore), there were about 130 gun injuries/deaths per 100k in a recent year -- in SF, about 30! Which is worse, getting shot, or avoiding poop on the sidewalk?
But also, for what it's worth, I'm a reasonably tall white guy. I think that affects how many unsafe situations I'm likely to encounter A LOT.
> there were about 130 gun injuries/deaths per 100k in a recent year -- in SF, about 30! Which is worse, getting shot, or avoiding poop on the sidewalk
San Francisco is number 23 for violent crime in the list of cities on wikipedia.
Your options are not "get shot in another city Vs avoiding poop on the sidewalk in San Francisco", it's "don't get hurt or killed in the average city Vs get hurt or killed in San Francisco".
You're equivocating "lack of gun crime" to safety, which is as incorrect as you can get while still misleading the audience
> No. It's number 37. It's number 23 with the default sort, which is alphabetical order. (California is early in the alphabet).
I checked, you're correct, but my point that it is more dangerous than the average city is still correct, even at #37.
> It's number 66 when you sort by homicides per 100k.
So? We're talking about safety here, not fatality. When people talk about safety, which is what I was responding to[1], they literally talking about violence, not "only violence that results in death".
I specifically addressed the posters dishonest equivocation that in other cities he is likely to be shot, while in SF all he has to do is step over poop.
The clear fact is that you're, on average, less safe in San Francisco than elsewhere; the gun argument doesn't factor into this so using it to show how "safe" SF is, is pointless ideology that is both irrelevant and dishonest.
[1] This is verbatim from the post I responded to:
> I generally haven't felt nearly as unsafe as people always play up.
> I checked, you're correct, but my point that it is more dangerous than the average city is still correct, even at #37.
It's actually probably 41st, but Durham, Toledo, Greensboro and Charlotte don't report rape numbers, but their murder, and aggravated assault numbers are notably higher than SF's, and their burglary numbers are similar.
> The clear fact is that you're, on average, less safe in San Francisco than elsewhere;
Among the top 20 cities, SF is basically smack dab in the middle in terms of safety, I didn't want to spend the time normalizing by crime rate and population (and that gives the opportunity to debate what to do with NYC, who is both a massive outlier by crime and size), but I think a reasonable summary is that SF is about average in terms of violence on a city by city basis or resident-by-resident basis. And is probably safer than average on a resident-by-resident basis if you exclude NYC.
That's a different conclusion than what you're coming to.
> That's a different conclusion than what you're coming to.
All I'm doing is contending the OP's claim that he is safer in SF while at the same time he is not living in a city that is noticeably less violent.
Even if you do the legwork to find that SF has average violence, the OP's delusional assertion is still incorrect, because he is not safer than the average person in the average city.
You know, when you make a statistical fail, the polite thing to do is take the correction in good heart and then sit it out for the day, instead of battling through the thread and tagging the person you originally disagreed with as 'delusional.'
>> while in SF all he has to do is step over poop.while
> Your odds of being shot seems to be significantly less in SF.
Irrelevant to his point that all he has to worry about in a less-safe-than-average city is to step over poop.
If you're living in a city that has more violent crime than average, it's dishonest to claim that all you have to worry about is non-violent crime because "guns bad, m'kay?"
> If you're living in a city that has more violent crime than average
It's not really clear to me this is the case. The average violent crime rate for the top 25 cities, excluding Charlotte (because they don't report most crimes to the feds) is 702/100,000; SF's is 715, which is a statistical tie. And then, the murder rate is way below the average.
You also need to consider demographics; e.g. a young city with an active club scene probably has a higher incidence of robberies.
I'd also appreciate you to cut the aggressive language in talking about this. If we're talking about fallacies, ranking cities in alphabetical order to determine their crime rates is not awesome. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, so perhaps reduce the amount of scorn you're piling on other people?
There's plenty to complain about in SF. My considered opinion is:
* SF is somewhat safer than the average large US city (violent crime rate is comparable; severe crimes are at a lower rate)
* Quality of life crime is really bad; #4 in your list of 100 for property crime, at a rate that is a high multiple of the average.
I don't know where you got your gun injuries / death stats, but there are two things to be careful of here:
1) substitution effects. As a hypothetical example, we could have one city that has 30 gun murders per 100k and another that has 130 per 100k, but both have the same murder rate (because you can murder with things other than guns). IMHO the important rate is the murder rate, and how much of it is with guns vs. other stuff is an aside.
2) Make sure your numbers don't include suicides. If they include suicides, they're not informative.
I've also lived in San Francisco for many years, in different neighborhoods. Now with my family including 2 young kids. The usual media narrative around SF is also very foreign to me and doesn't match my personal experience. Living in SoMa has very little in common with living anywhere west of Twin Peaks.
Therefore the need to rely on data to find more objectivity when debating public policies. Yes data can be twisted and most of the time is poorly reported and interpreted by people, but it's better than relying on personal anecdotes.
Interestingly, during my one bar night out in Seoul on an overnight visit to change visas for Japan, some dude started a fight with someone and tried to grab a knife sitting on a table while being escorted out. The people around me didn't seem particularly horrified by that spectacle though. I lived in Tokyo for 6 years, SF feels fine coming from there.
American cities are more violent, yes. But it doesn't make a lot of sense to pin that on San Francisco politicians, which usually seems to be the endgame with these warnings about how dangerous it is.
I don’t live in SF, but I live nearby and take my kids there for outings pretty frequently. The news reports and anecdotes have made me a little wary of these outings, but our actual experiences never have. I don’t doubt that others have very different, equally valid experiences of the city, and I do hate to see the abject misery that’s on full display in some neighborhoods. But I’ve never felt unsafe there in the 30+ years I’ve been exploring the city, including while walking at night with little kids.
I take my kids there all the time as well. There are so many fun kids things to do - Exploratorium, GG Park, Cal Academy, Tunnel Tops park, Presidio, Crissy Field, GG bridge, Ocean Beach etc. etc. Stop falling for nonsense tropes
I grew up in "safe suburbs" and moved here 5 years ago. Saw a lot of sad changes with COVID... but in terms of safety, I'm 100% with you. On rare occasion, I'll cross a street if an individual is behaving particularly weirdly but I've never witnessed/experienced a "random act of violence". Broadly speaking, SF is safe from violent crime unless you're looking for trouble.
I'm sure parents with young children or elderly have a different experience but that's not different for any other larger US city.
With this said, the topic of the city turning a blind eye to property crime and "extreme", visible destitution is a whole different story.
Yeah, I agree with this. Visiting SF from other American cities that have nothing like the scale of its problems...is jarring. I'm sure you can get used to it.
Also, we should differentiate between the feeling of comfort / safety (which is what most people care about), and actual crime statistics (which are themselves fraught, I don't think people in SF even report car break-ins these days since the police and justice systems don't work any more).
I wouldn't walk in Valencia late at night. It's not a safe area. As evidence, a Twitter employee was shot and killed there in 2020; he was caught in the crossfire of a shootout.
> Brousseau was walking home from Dolores Park at 8:22 p.m. Friday when 50 to 60 shots were fired at the intersection of Rosa Parks Lane and Guerrero Street, according to San Francisco police. The gunfire left him critically wounded and caused non-life-threatening injuries to an 18-year-old victim
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Twitter-employee-t...
Rosa Parks Lane & Guerrero Street is one block away from Valencia Street.
I used to live in the area around the same time. I walked Guerrero frequently to go grocery shopping and get to my gym, usually between 7:00pm and 10:00pm. That easily could have been me. Needless to say I don't live there anymore.
I wouldn't walk alone in the TL or SOMA at night, but if you skip those neighborhoods entirely after 5pm you're going to miss some of the best bars and venues in the city!
Black Cat, Emperor Norton's, Zombie Village, Bar 888, Tempest, the EndUp...Maybe one reason the "SF is a hellhole" crowd are so negative about this town are because they shut themselves out of so many great places!
yeah you can drink and party for a few years but then the filth, the misery, and in many cases the idiocy of this city starts to wear one down. I've been working in the city for decades but now I'm just fed up and disillusioned. I can't help these people and this misery will not stop, and no amount of drinks at the tempest will change that.
Welcome to our world in Chicago, where we have been living in a hellhole for about a decade. There is a lot more violent crime here than SF but it is almost all in small pockets of the city.
This is simply a narrative that certain people are trying to portray to prove that certain policy doesn’t work. It’s nonsense.
I would disagree. I walk, drive and ride all over SF, including TL/SOMA because I'm not too squeamish and it's on the way between a lot of pairs of destinations.
I can tell you that if you took these 3 maps and overlaid them you'd have an SF sketchiness map.
Flat-land -> easy walking, access for transients
Transit -> access for transients
Zoned for density -> lower civic engagement, more likely to end up losing out and getting navigation centers and needle exchanges.
Most of the property crime seems to involve people in cars. In addition, drivers killed 50 people in San Francisco last year, mostly pedestrians. There were 55 homicides in the last year -- to be clear that 105 killings last year, about 50% by drivers.
It’s pretty incredible to me that the whole community on the last thread was fixated on the fact that it must’ve been the homeless/drug addicts. What kind of place is it where you immediately dismiss premeditated murder, or even throw it up as 50-50?
>It’s pretty incredible to me that the whole community on the last thread was fixated on the fact that it must’ve been the homeless/drug addicts.
Completely agree, I was downvoted into oblivion last week for claiming it was possibly somebody in his circle rather than a random stanger. The assumptions made about the inhumanity of the homeless/poor is worrying.
I think that says more about Hacker News than SF. There's a level of hate for the city here that I don't understand. Feels a bit like a vendetta sometimes.
I'm coming up on 6 years in Seattle. Lived in SLU or Denny Triangle (parts some people consider "downtown") the entire time. I've learned to just largely ignore the incredibly negative comments because my experience and the experience of all the people I know who live here are vastly different. While the city still has its problems I would like for people to approach solving them from a realistic point of view.
I lived in Seattle proper for over two years (2012-2015) and it absolutely was awful, at least in many parts of the city. Anywhere near Pioneer Square, for example.
It completely depends on where you live in SF. The people in the wealthy hyper gentrified areas are baffled that people would think the city is unsafe.
Meanwhile people with less income are exposed daily to an epidemic of drug addiction, homeless, theft, mental illness, all problems with straightforward solutions that the residents are screaming for.
Its not one or the other, its both. Just because you live in a safe neighborhood does not mean that everyone that doesn’t isn’t being “data driven” or “logical” enough.
Not so. I've mostly lived in a comparatively high crime neighborhoods in SF, though I live in Oakland now. I'm married to someone who grew up in the Tenderloin. Your argument that attitudes are correlated with residential wealth rather than experience may accurately capture a general trend but it is far from the cast-iron rule you suggest.
A lot of people on HN came to SF from elsewhere for money/career reasons, and were upset to discover that the city is not an extension of the Moscone Center (ironically enough named after a former mayor who was murdered - by one of the city supervisors who thought he was too 'woke': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Moscone).
Not to completely call Moscone the height of evil but there are definite allegations about him taking money/influence peddling from Jim Jones and the People’s Temple
A lot of city (and country) subs on reddit are overrun with people who don't live in the place commenting on what a hell-hole it is. We see this in New Zealand every time something gets international attention, and it's very obvious given time zones and posting volumes.
There is very little incentive for someone to believe that there is a better place to live than the one they're in and all the ego stroking to believe otherwise.
I think a lot people probably experienced or witnessed petty theft or assault, and figured those same people might commit murder at a high rate. When you have a personal experience like that, or multiple, the natural reaction is to apply that experience to another situation.
It actually says a lot about SF that people would jump to that conclusion. SF is not in a good place. It has deteriorated over the past 2 decades. But it's not why Bob Lee is dead.
There is a cancer of cynicism and hate in these parts. Always has been but now it feels that it's the victim and now it has the tools to grow. This was a failed attempt at growth. It will try again until it is eradicated.
Nobody ever produced any evidence to the contrary. I've read hundreds of blog posts saying he 'must have' been murdered by powerful political figures on the basis that powerful figures have means, motives, and opportunities that are not available to most ordinary folk, and therefore that mere possibility is sufficient to be considered a probability. The absence of evidence is thrown back as 'proof' of a cover-up.
The point is more that the local police said it was likely a robbery gone wrong when there's no evidence for that and every media outlet repeats it as fact and "nothing to see here". The would-be robbers didn't wind up taking anything from him and it's not a neighborhood known for a high crime rate. There's also tons of other "but but but" coverage, including extensively in the Wikipedia article on the topic, that completely misses the point.
The person who published the DNC leaks said it was an inside source and that it wasn't a foreign government. No one seems to believe this despite no evidence to the contrary (and other groups having access to the same information is not evidence, since it was proven that multiple groups did)
Anyway it's too much to cover here and is off topic and I'm not going to change any minds, so i'll leave it there
I have a family member who is a police officer (investigator) in another country. I was telling them about this killing and how crazy things seemed in San Francisco during my last visit.
His first and only response was "well, how do you know that's even related? Most people get killed by somebody they know." and I was like "well, yeah, but San Francisco is bad right now" and the conversation moved on.
His intuition is supported by sober experience and understanding of the data. Equating that to your intuition is exactly why so many folks here(and on twitter) got this wrong.
Mosts stats are like this when you start understanding the nuance. For example, the bike fatality rate. Its 36 people on average a year for LA county. You can't draw anything meaningful from that data at all. The county is 10 million people. What is even the variance year to year? It could be like the bulk of that number. That's just considering the statistics of the number and how rare these sort of incidents really are.
Now consider yourself versus the average bike rider you see. Are they wearing a helmet? Following traffic rules? Using lights? Taking the entire lane? Signalling? Making left turns from the perpendicular street instead of merging into the turn lane for cars? Chances are they might only be doing one or two of those things, but probably none of those things on average based on my own anecdata of what I see cyclists looking like in my city. If you consider riders who do all of these things, whats the fatality rate then? I'd bet its effectively zero a year.
Crime works accordingly. We hear people say how they think the murder rate is a good proxy for crime you'd experience in a city, since you can't really hide a body and fudge the stats like other crimes that might go unreported. However, the murder rate is also a case of a small number of occurances happening over a massive population, and probably subject to a lot of variation. Likewise, it probably disproportionately affects people in domestic violence altercations who already own a gun that they keep in the home and know their victim, then secondly people involved with organized crime. Avoiding these factors that put you at outsized risk might make the murder rate effectively zero for someone like you.
What’s meaningful is how what feels like wide spread petty theft gives a real sense of lawlessness to the point where something like this feels inevitable. MANY of us assumed the worst, which is a sad state of affairs. I guess it’s good that it wasn’t seemingly random (although obviously horrific it happened at all), but I hope there is pressure on the city to clean up the other bits.
Bear in mind that there are people who dedicate their efforts toward making others feel that way, for fun and profit. There is a whole industry of 'crime porn' dedicated to telling people what they want to hear.
Being out at night is basically always less safe than during the day. No question, any area in the county probably safe or not.
Your car example is the funniest one because a car is a lot less safe at night, from people being tired or drunk.
Honestly, if you're married and have kids, being out socially at 230am is irresponsible imo.
Even if you're working late at the office, you have some uncomfortably higher odds of being taken out by a drink driver on the way home. Or robbed/killed at a gas station if you forgot you were low. This is stuff people knew and talked about not too long ago, but now we pretend it's not the case for some reason.
This is shocking and saddening, and should also be a lesson to this community: previous threads on this tragedy immediately jumped to blaming the homeless, when the overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by individuals known to the victim.
Edit: Added "violent," to preempt diversions about non-violent crimes.
This suspect is innocent until proven guilty and we will all still be here when the trial finishes. There is no reason to rush out to come up with a viewpoint that might be shown false with later revelations. If we've learned something from the people who jumped straight to total confidence that it was caused by homelessness, then let's apply it.
The suspect is indeed innocent until proven guilty. I haven't advanced any claim that this particular suspect is the perpetrator; only that violent crimes are overwhelmingly committed by people known to their victims.
I hope that we can extend the same fundamental legal skepticism to society's most needy.
You appear the be incorrect according to the latest statistics I could find from the Bureau of Justice Statistics [1].
Most violent crimes are committed by someone known to the victim (defined as an acquaintance, friend, family member, or intimate partner) and of the ones you listed, robbery is the only exception (62% committed by strangers, 32% committed by someone known, and 6% is unknown).
Can you please direct towards the data you are citing?
The linked report seems to indicate, in every year of every chart, "stranger violence" to be 2-3 times that of "domestic violence" (depending on the specific measurement).
Perhaps you were citing reporting percentages?
Domestic Violence is defined in the report as "includ[ing] the subset of violent victimizations that were committed by current or former intimate partners or family members, spouses, boyfriends, or girlfriends."
Stranger Violence is not defined in the report, but seems fairly clear non-the-less.
The report also states homicide statistics are not included in the figures.
This doesn't mean San Francisco is exonerated from being a crime-laden city. It's an inconvenient truth but car break-ins, looting of retail shops, open air drug markets, unhygienic streets, and rampant homelessness are worse than ever.
I'd say that the lesson learned needs to be broader than that. Any time Texas, California, Portland etc are mentioned the culture warriors of the left and right come out. The effect is a lot of lost trust for each other in this community when that happens. I do appreciate the people who posted on the other thread saying they were wrong about assuming a homeless person did it, but this won't be the last time culture war issues land discretely on the front page.
Certainly there are some culture warriors, who use these situations only as springboards to their pre-existing and unmovable opinions about those on the Other Side.
But it’s not all culture war. I like to think that in HN it’s all legitimate viewpoints.
And relevant to HN is that, culture wars aside, it involves challenging and interesting problems (homelessness, drugs, petty crime). There are multiple approaches to situations like these and the best solutions could well be a compromise.
I get quite tired of catty replies like this. If you think "your side" doesn't contribute to an ecosystem of cause and effect I don't know what to tell you. If you're so fragile that you need to hear it spelled out, "The right is still on average worse than you but you're still bad" then I also don't know what to tell you. Maybe, just, don't participate in discourse or something. Your opinion isn't needed, wanted, or appreciated.
Being tired of low effort comments and telling you off as a result isn't being fragile. Feeling the need to make a childish, two word mocking comment when your side (which also includes my side) is given the least bit of criticism for participating in a cause and effect cycle is squarely fragile.
You may be focusing on the negative aspect of it ( and possibly only one perspective, but I will wait for your response to confirm if that is the case ). As a potential tourist, opinion of others of a given locale will make a difference in deciding whether I will want to visit. In other words, it absolutely makes sense to not only hold, but even seek out opinion of other places. But, in line with what you said, we are not all wired the same way. Still, just because it does not make sense to you does not mean others don't see value in it.
Absolutely none of this justifies blaming every violent crime on homeless people, as HN is quick to do. SF is not an outlier, nationally, in terms of the proportion of violent crimes perpetrated by people known to their victims.
You're right, here's some data to support your point:
>In 2020, the reported violent crime rate in S.F. was 21% below the average of 20 most populous cities other than San Francisco for which there was full 2020 data available. Meanwhile, the city’s property crime rate was 41% above average.
>San Francisco’s violent crime rate has declined significantly since the early 1990s – a trend that is consistent with the rest of the state. Anti-gun violence initiatives in S.F. may have contributed to this trend.
>“We found little relationship between encampments and nearly all forms of reported property crime,” Lanfear said, “but a very strong link between reported property crime and complaints about homelessness.”
If you have no problem living near homeless encampments, that is totally fine, you are welcome to live wherever you want.
Personally, I don't like living in a city where I walk past people pooping on the sidewalk. Which I've witnessed in SF. If you have statistics that people pooping on the sidewalk on the middle of the day happens 20% less often in SF than other cities, then great, I guess I'm just lucky to have not seen that in NYC,BOS,ATL.
> in terms of the proportion of violent crimes perpetrated by people known to their victims
The factoid you're trying to cite is specifically about murder. Most homicides are indeed committed by someone the victim knew.
SF's homicide rate isn't out of proportion with other big cities. It's crime rate is, however, and the overwhelming majority of crime being committed there right now happens to be from homeless transients. The types that break into your car to sell whatever they can get a hold of for more drugs.
Crime is severely under-reported in SF. The police are powerless to do anything to a transient - they will not pay a fine or appear in court anyway after all. So the system negatively feeds into itself - false crime statistics, which gives the politicians cover to claim crime is down. Just go there yourself... you can see it so very readily.
The cleanliness is another related issue.
SF needs to get itself back in order. It's driving people away.
This is what I'm talking about: this is a thread about a violent crime, and you're talking about quality of life. This has nothing to do with the tragedy at hand, and conflating the two only serves to demonize society's most needy.
If you find that SF's quality of life doesn't suit you, then don't live there. I don't.
We know. There has been a mass exodus from the area for various reasons - among which is the crime and cleanliness issue. How many HNer's have moved away and are never coming back?
SF is facing a looming income issue since so many high earners have left the area. This will contribute to it's decline even further.
Safety and cleanliness are not what I would dismiss as quality of life issues. Those are basic needs.
It's not in the tech circle news, but this murder happened literally days after Hindenburg Research released a very long article on money laundering and widespread fraud at Block (CashApp's parent company). Apparently the app is widely used to launder drug money.
Not saying that's related, but you would have to investigate that angle in a murder.
Hindenburg has an incredible track record. Every time they release a report, it’s a major news event in the financial world. If they write about your business, you can easily expect the stock to drop 10-25%. Their last report on Adani caused the stock to drop nearly 60%.
Honestly they’re doing the job regulators should be doing.
I've always thought Marc Antony's speech was bullshit - "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones."
It's way more common to ignore/forget/never mention again anything bad someone who died did.
Also the crypto world seems to be getting a bit stabby in various ways, as things come crashing down there may be repercussions. Unlikely in this case, probably. Much more likely to be domestic of some sort.
People don't talk often about it, but there's quite a bit of crime (including violent crime) that goes on in the Bay's big-money sector. I guess this shouldn't be surprising (power corrupts), but it sure does seem like people feel uncomfortable talking about how many tech execs end up poisoned by heroin from a prostitute or under investigation for a 30-year-old murder or dead in a workplace shooting.
> San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug-use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the police clearance rate for property crimes has long been minimal. But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low and is lower than that in most mid-to-large-sized cities.
Is the "Expand IT, Inc" on the LinkedIn profile the only evidence that the "alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew."
There's comments is this thread of amazing journalism but the LLC shows as inactive on the Division of CA website (entity 201008110204) and the Expand IT website itself is dead. For all we know, this is a Lyft or Uber driver. Unless I'm missing some SFPD statement known to the journalist?
EDIT: got an old filling; see njstraub608's comment. My mistake
Doing a little research myself shows that he was test savey enough to know to get privacy on his, expired, website, was endorsed on LinkedIn for Cloud Computing, Virtualization by other Tech CEOs and Staff Architects, gave recommendations on LinkedIn for architects (including one at AWS) who display those recommendations on LI and say that they were clients of his, at one point was hiring for hiring for front end engineers, was keeping up to date on OS updates as far back as windows 8/9, and he clearly knows the lingo of IT.
Could it be an uber driver or lyft driver? Sure. But it seems like someone who has run a consulting business for many years in the tech space.
Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.
Doesn't sound to me like the reporter is just speculating based on the LinkedIn profile.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure you have the wrong filing. The LinkedIn profile says "Inc", not "LLC", so I think it's probably file #4776106, which is still active, and registered with an address in Emeryville, which is where police were headed to arrest Momeni.
I was going off the 2010 date but you could be right. I didn't mean to jump to conclusions; just seems like I'm missing some details that leads to the author's convictions. Probably I'm missing the police portrayals mentioned in the article.
The 911 call data was for an address, he likely linked said address to tax data to get the property owner then did LinkedIn
search. Additionally could have used arrest data. 911 and arrest in my city don’t have names but by linkage via methods named it’s possible.
At most he used a radius for the 911 call to check possible names, and had a contact at SFPD or the courts to confirm once he had a name.
The LLC isn't inactive, you just found the wrong one. EXPAND IT INC (4776106) is registered to the proper address. Guessing the website is down from traffic.
It’s pretty obviously not. The answers are in the article. The police claims they were driving together. You don’t usually drive together with someone you don’t know late at night.
> Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.
The website is possibly down from all the other amateur internet sleuth traffic out there -- there are fairly recent snapshots on the Internet Archive.
SF is safer than many of its peers, but some people seem to really want to paint the city as a failure. "Rampant crime" is one obvious way to do that. Over time the narrative leaks into the broader consciousness.
Chicago deals with the same.
I feel pretty confident that some of this is astroturfing from people with political ideologies trying to score points on blue states, but it seems to be quite effective however it is accomplished. People can be quick to scare, and appeals to their sense of personal safety are quite powerful.
People are conflating street homelessness with crime. Seeing homeless people in their neighborhood makes people feel guilty and uncomfortable, so they demand that the police remove them from public view.
Because there is no coherent strategy to deal with housing in North America, this will continue to get worse. For whatever reason, reactionary public opinion is fine spending inordinate sums of money on policing, but freaks out when it is directed toward public housing, which in the long term is a much cheaper solution.
It sounds like this information wasn't released publicly by the local authorities.
The article has a link to a LinkedIn profile. The writer indicates that the name and city of the LI profile matches the information on the person they were "told" was arrested this morning. Even the name of the company of the person indicated is explicitly referenced in the article.
My professional world doesn't allow for ambiguity. As a journalist, how sure do you need to be about the accuracy of this information before going public?
You'd be surprised what information is released to the public. I'd be willing to bet that the reporter has access to dispatch logs from over-the-air radio [1] and cross-references that with incident reports at [2] and then does a lookup on [3]. Entirely speculation, but it's not implausible.
Absolutely, there are many data sources available so piece some of this together.
What I find interesting is indicating a LinkedIn profile, unless of course this reporter has access to investigation documents that also identify the LinkedIn profile.
It could very well be a different person with the same name in the same town. Why take the risk? Just so you can have the juicy headline "alleged killer also worked in tech."
Generally a source isn't somebody you don't know, a journalist should know who the source is, their relationship to the subject and have developed some type of trust with them. Without that trust, a journalist opens themselves up to libel if it turns out this person was not the person arrested.
I haven’t been to SF in 10+ years, but I grew up in a (more) dangerous American city. I’m curious how much of the panic over public safety in the Bay Area is massively skewed by upper middle class immigrants (from safer suburban America, or from other countries) getting their first taste of American urban life. I don’t want to sound too dismissive, American cities are really dangerous and impoverished compared to what they should be, but is SF really that bad compared to comparable American cities?
I have only lived for extensive periods of time in two cities: SF (2 years about) and Philadelphia (4 years). The biggest difference between them is that even in some of the worst areas of Philadelphia in terms of drug crime, there were far fewer people actively dealing or doing drugs on the streets in large groups. It was more spread out—there were issues in all areas of the city, but there was no area with the sheer concentration of say the Tenderloin or SOMA. There were basically no differences in terms of the transit systems—I don’t think BART or MUNI are any worse than SEPTA.
This is true—some of the people I met in Philly had serious drug addictions but their rent was only 300 a month for a whole house. I genuinely don’t think there is any equivalent in SF. That is probably also why I almost never saw tents or similar in Philly.
People were so quick to assume the nature of the crime even when no info about a possible suspect had been publicly released. Check the quote tweets to Bob's 2019 tweet about "recognize that your black friends face challenges you don’t"
The comments on that tweet are sickening. And people will say with a straight face that there are no more race problems in this country except wokeism.
Yes, there are a lot of people who will say that. They provide a living, walking straw man, and there are enough of them that I can't say you're cherry picking. As for the tweet, I can't see any reason I'd start reading twitter now, I've been long disgusted with the quality of discourse on twitter.
But if you decide to dismiss the concerns about the excesses of the far left by pointing to racist responses to a tweet somewhere, you aren't being honest about a real problem.
I avoid the term "woke", but when James Carville (famous democratic strategist) said "wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it" (in regards to the far left harming mainstream democrats in elections), I'm not sitting around scratching my head bewildered as to what he's talking about.
What are "the excesses of the far left"? What is the "far left" even?
> I'm not sitting around scratching my head bewildered as to what he's talking about.
Strange, because despite the extra paragraph that you spent dancing up to the subject, I have no idea what you're referring to. Or rather, I do, but I know why you wouldn't (try to) spell it out here.
I am still interested in knowing what you think Carville was talking about, without prompting from me. You might want to read the interview where he said this.
But I'll give an example. Again, I want to point out that I don't use the term "woke", which I consider to be unhelpful. But here's an example of what I would view as the self-defeating behavior of the far left.
Let's take Judge Duncan's talk at Stanford. Now, I probably don't need to convince you to be concerned about the 5th circuit court or Duncan's judicial record. That much, at least, we already agree about. And anyway, there are far better people than me to explain it.
Unfortunately, those better people didn't get a chance to do so. I would say that the behavior from the Stanford Law school students who chose to disrupt the speech was an example of harmful behavior from the radical left that represents a pretty serious setback for moderate liberals. Duncan won this round, and there really was no need to hand him such a victory. Stanford looked bad, DEI admins looked bad, the student protestors looked bad. They provided a right wing judge with an an opportunity to obfuscate, avoid getting questioned and pressed on important points where he's genuinely vulnerable, and they took from the left the opportunity to raise awareness of really serious implications of what I consider to be a radical court. Worst, they gave him the opportunity to paint his opponents the worst possible light. I think they gave the right wing a real gift that day.
So yeah, I think that everyone on the moderate left knows this is becoming a problem.
I’d consider that issue distinct from wokeism. I agree that there are anti-productive leftist behaviors. My original point was not that this didn’t exist. BUt rather the same people who often complain about wokeism or CRT are those whose behavior perpetuates the issues.
That's because the 4chan/pol/ crowd are actively pushing into Twitter; for all practical purposes it's the biggest chan raid of all time, except that it's largely at the invitation of Twitter's owner. Once again linking this excellent paper on the dynamics of intergroup aggression in virtual spaces: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
One of the first things I said when I heard about this was: "Gee, there certainly has been an unexpected number of stabbings around mobilecoin. I wonder if this has something to do with the billion dollars stolen from FTX by someone seemingly connected with mobilecoin." -- but at a glance I'm not seeing a connection with the person they arrested. Interesting.
I had family ask me about it, concerned for my welfare, and I told them I was confused why this was getting national media coverage other violent crimes in SF hadn't received, and mentioned my initial thoughts that it might have been motivate by sketchy cryptocurrency crap.
Yet when I saw the popular narrative that it was some random stabbing in SF I didn't really have a reason to doubt it: I've personally been chased by a crazy person with a knife in the city.
Ah, apparently it was a strangulation rather than a stabbing! I'll refrain from repeating the accused's name here because I see now that the charges were dropped -- but it was on HN before and left an impression on me: maybe I'm old fashioned but I usually expect the number of assaults, attempted murders, or murders connected with a project team to be zero.
My first travel to SF was in 2010 and last one in 2018. In the 2018 trip I wasn't comfortable walking in the market street to get back to my hotel in the evening (I was staying in Hyatt Regency). Maybe I got older and more fearful for my safety, but that is a personal experience I have with SF.
And everyone (especially here) blaming the homeless and mentally ill people abandoned by the system.
The homeless-phobia of white collar individuals is the problem.
A lot of that homeless-phobia is the fact that most white collar individuals are closer to living paycheck to paycheck than they're willing to let on. They're afraid of the homeless and see themselves distinct from them because "those lazy bums lost their jobs" and "I have to keep working so I don't end up like them". It's classic class warfare (fomented from the top) as a way for those at the top to end up with obedient workers who do not want to rock the boat for fear of the consequences.
I wondered if the killer knew him. That area of city is not a sketchy one, and while random violence can happen anywhere it just seemed unlikely, esp given descriptions that he would be unlikely to resist a mugging (and provoke an escalation).
He is not their man yet. Innocent until proven guilty. The word "alleged" is important here. In Journalism 101 they teach you to be very careful when talking about suspected criminals. You don't want to portray someone as guilty until that has been proven in court.
Look at it this way: do you want police not disclosing who they arrest?
Name, age, city is pretty common; especially name and age of someone arrested. I'd imagine it public records.
Some quick googling for recent examples. I just looked for news articles, not sure what if the police release has more residency info on the ones that aren't listed in the articles.
I've seen an article about this suspect that includes their address, what they paid for the house, other places they've lived, etc. Different to police releasing information though.
Yea, a great deal of information is available to the public once you have their name and city. Which isn’t really a new thing, many phone books used to include peoples address alongside their names and phone numbers.
I was suspicious of the "homeless killer" narrative because I worked in that neighbhorhood for a long time and there were no homeless people anywhere near there. Also, I've walked past many of the SF drug-addled homeless and none of them seemed physically robust enough to stab anyone other than another drug-addled homeless person. (the non-drug homeless around the Haight and those areas are completely different and extremely scary sometimes)
I recall a sad point to this case captured on surveillance video:
As Bob Lee was bleeding out, he went to driver for aid who ignored him and fled the scene. Shouldn't they be arrested and charged for failure to render aid? Perhaps he would've had a chance if he had arrived at a trauma ER but it's now an unknowable.
Watch how fast this falls out of the news cycle because it doesn’t align with America’s view of San Francisco. So far I’ve heard it was: a homeless person, a junkie, mentally ill, violent criminal common to San Francisco.
Part of me felt this was personal. A stabbing you have to get fairly close. Bob Lee could know his killer. And I don’t know him well enough to know who he hung out with.
If you saw last weeks comments you would think it was a homeless, drug crazed, criminal. One of the tops comments stated, with authority, it was someone homeless. And how the cops were not going to do anything about it.
Car crashes aren't typically included in "violent deaths", because the definition of "violence" typically includes intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence
I thought about specifying some form of "human induced killing" but couldn't figure out how to word-lawyer it to be the group consisting of "murder + suicide".
Someone on Metafilter(?) once suggested a high overlap between IT personnel and libertarians.
It has been interesting to consider but after decades of observation I don't think it's a political thing-- I think tech attracts a disproportionate number of textbook Narcissists.
Those fuckers crave power. We have absolute control over entire ecosystems. At first it's freedom for all, but then we turn into dictators regarding our governance of it.
In the end it becomes Domain Admin rights for me, principle of least privilege for thee.
I was really betting that HN comments would all be Mission homeless complaining about how dangerous the city is with all of those ultraviolent tech bros in it.
I’m kind of annoyed at people who automatically assume that homeless commit more crimes. Is there any stats to suggest that they commit more crimes than homed people? Sure, maybe they do some petty theft (I don’t know - is there any research). Maybe. I imagine most of it is in stores and not mugging people or crimes of opportunity. Most of them are just really down on their luck for whatever reason and can’t find their way out. There’s this narrative that forms, explicitly or implicitly, that these people are in that situation because they deserve to be. The drug problem they have is the cause of their homelessness (despite all the research repeatedly showing that giving people housing they can count on and a good support system is the best way to get then rehabilitated).
We find the crime narrative so appealing though. It’s those dirty homeless. That’s why crime has gone up (homicides in SF at historic lows). And it’s exceedingly hard to overcome emotionally. I get it. But HN is supposed to be a logical community, not one where emotions are allowed to run rampant.
When I walked up to my car with broken windows, my initial reaction was to blame the homeless guy next to our on the street. But realistically, who would stay by the site of a crime? Maybe that’s what he wanted me to think, but seems unlikely and he was very afraid I’d tear into him about it because that’s probably happened to him more than once in the past. They know how other people look at them and that takes a serious mental toll on you. How could it not if the vast majority of people around you treat you like shit. I had to remember that the factual reporting on the topic seems to point that SF’s car breakins problem is an organized crime. A crime ring the SF police can’t or won’t get a handle on. Maybe an explicit deal to keep homicide rates low? It came out Toronto police had been doing that and following that violent crimes started going up quite rapidly. Drug dealers and organized crime organizations aren’t sleeping on the streets. Heck, I’m pretty sure one tried to approach me to be a mule and he was dressed upscale and definitely not homeless. Most violence is reliably either someone you know or more organized crime (eg gang initiations).
Sure. SF does have a really bad homeless problem. And they do cause problems but it’s mostly around there being messes everywhere which is unpleasant and is uncomfortable being around unpredictable people with mental illnesses. But I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes mostly because of how society treats them, so I at least try to have some compassion and engage with them from time to time. I know how to distinguish discomfort from feeling unsafe. I know logically and factually even crazy people walking around on the street are not going to turn into a problem (I’m surrounded by them daily in the part of the city I live). But it’s still uncomfortable to be around and even my dog is wary of people like that which speaks to the base lizard brain reacting. I accept that’s my reaction but it fundamentally is not the other person’s problem. I’m responsible for my reaction to uncomfortable feelings.
People really need to understand homelessness and react to it with compassion rather than treating it like a dirty thing they might infect you with if they come near and the source of societies problems. Homelessness is ultimately a reflection of the failing of our society, not a reflection of the failings of the individuals impacted by it.
PS: the homeless don’t get any protection on the streets from the police. Most homeless crime is homeless on homeless because the police refuse to keep them safe or because the homeless district the police / governments due to repeated cycles of abuse and victimization. Not sure what the story is in SF per se, but I can’t imagine that part is better.
This news really highlights the confirmation bias that was in full bloom throughout the "discourse" around the initial reports of Lee's murder (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899). Everyone is so quick to jump on negative news about the rare violent crime in e.g. SF thanks to feelings about petty property crime that it's obviously impossible to have any kind of fact-based dialogue about policy.
Worth keeping in mind next time something comes along that might confirm your priors.
(Edit: notable that the thread linked above had _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]. I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"? )
I remember as a teen going to my dad with some outrage bait news I'd heard on the internet that totally fit into my preconceived notions, and he just said "Now think about that for a second. Does that sound like something that's fully true, or is it something that someone thinks you want to hear?"
It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.
I lived in SF for ~15 years, experienced multiple car breakins (when I had a car) and one weird guy who walked up to me on the street and said "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" (which I somehow calmly ignored). For the record, I didn't comment in that thread and I generally don't feel the need to bash SF in public - I just simply moved out.
The only thing I'm "championing" (just pointing out, really) is that certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities, despite all available data contradicting that worldview.
I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.
On the other hand, I feel like it takes an incredibly public tragedy for a platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.
People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.
> quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities
I don't see why speaking out about lack of police enforcement is seen as 'quasi-apocalyptic'.
> despite all available data contradicting that worldview
All available data is in favor of those speaking out about crime & drugs in west coast cities. Additionally, the eye test seems to portray a situation that's more dire than even the data might suggest. (underreporting, catch & release).
> People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.
Indeed, because that's not what this forum is for. There's ten thousand fora online for general, local, or city-policy political discussion; those topics are only germane in this forum when they relate to tech or the processes of tech.
Because HN is a technology discussion board with a worldwide audience, not a local politics one. YCombinator isn't even based in SF.
When the CEO of YCombinator blocks people on Twitter for disagreeing with him online on SF politics[0], it tells me I don't want HN to be a haven for that.
FWIW, he mass blocks people who have _never_ interacted with him on twitter. If you happen to like a tweet from an account that he doesn't like, you're blocked!
I get that people need to protect their feeds for their mental health, but I'd expect a public figure to have thicker skin and not default to hitting the scorched-earth-mega-auto-block button so often.
I wouldn't really take who YCombinator execs have blocked with much of an indication of anything. It's a badge of honor to be blocked by Paul Graham over something silly and petty.
It's indicative of the exec's desire to actually engage on a topic with people who might disagree with them. That's a big issue with how much control they can potentially exert on this site.
> platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.
I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.
I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"
EDIT: Just to cite my sources: [0] shows 397k registered cars in SF [1] shows 810k residents.
> I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.
As a European on this platform it's ceaseless whinging about the state of SF and how the "woke mob" are ruining San Francisco and the state of the Tenderloin versus Mission or Market or whatever and I don't particularly care to know.
Like I've started to learn the parts of a city I have no particular interest in visiting from repeated stories about how someone shouted and pooped in the street because of boogeyman de jour.
Definitely feels like maybe YC could make a "local HN" to save the rest of us from these circular discussions.
I appreciate you saying so. As a 20-year SF resident I wondered if it was just confirmation bias making me think those topics/views were incredibly common. But it's at the point where I'd almost rather deal with Bitcoin boosters.
>I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"
Hmm, the vast majority of tourists in Orlando aren't Orlando residents, but if I got murdered back in my hotel on a Disneyworld trip, I would hope they'd be willing to at least poke into it.
You must have some filter on. There are literally thousands of HN posts in the last few years about housing and crime and hundreds of which devolved into the dystopian hellhole memes endemic in the HN ideosphere.
The quickest path to karma at HN is to post anything about BA housing.
Crime - and SF crime specifically - frequently gets discussed on HN when crime-related stories make it to the front page. You're not paying attention if you think the site has a zero-tolerance policy for it.
Someone saying that the have a gun and are going to shoot you is very clearly assault, which is a criminal act. It would generally quality as a violent crime in statistics (if SFPD took reports of threats of violence, which they will not).
While we should use data, we should also understand where there may be issues with the data that we're using.
The gist of your point is 100% correct. I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.
> Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.
Calmly ignoring the threat is evidence that the person was not "in immediate apprehension of such a contact".
I only bring this up because i think it's interesting, and the underlying point you are making is 100% correct. This kind of thing is not normal nor innocent and not to be tolerated.
Oh, I was definitely apprehensive of imminent harm.
More details: Fairly normal-looking dude walked up next to me and kept pace for a couple minutes, threatening me and calling me "faggot" (which seemed odd, since I was walking with my girlfriend at the time). I didn't see an actual gun so I figured that the safest course of action was to simply ignore him until he presented more of a threat or walked away. I guess I bored him so he walked away.
For sure. I didn't mean to derail the thread or tell you how you feel, just share what I think is an interesting aspect of assault as defined in common law. But your subjective experience here is exactly what the law means to recognize with assault and sounds like it was assault. But who knows. Glad the situation fizzled out (usually best case scenario)
> I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.
This is actually an interesting point of semantics to me. I guess it'd really hinge on how you define "calmly" here - if you saw me walking my dog while a homeless person screamed that he was going to kill me, I would certainly appear calm. Even internally, I suspect my heart rate would increase but not enormously. Still, I would be very alert and mentally prepared for the possibility that this person is going to attack me, because I very much believe that to be possible. Given that, I would say that I have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harm (and I expect a lot of San Franciscans are similar in that regard).
It's a reasonable belief and fear that person will carry out the act. You are probably misinterpreting the reasonable part, especially when people mask their reaction to try to get away or out of shock / instinct. The person making the threats probably gets enjoyment from getting a rise out of random strangers. Also, returning to the original context, there are too many people on the street that have severe mental health crises going on and are freely roaming some cities. They don't necessarily need to go to be convicted of a crime as a solution.
We should also take practical steps to increase your chances of survival, which, if someone says this to you:
- Keep an eye on their hands.
- Attempt to de-escalate the person.
- If they brandish a weapon in extreme close proximity to yourself, use both your hands to firmly grab onto the hand/wrist that's holding the weapon and extend your arms fully (using your skeleton to maintain that distance and provide added strength). Your focus should be on controlling that hand so they don't stab or shoot you. Yes, you may incur injury regardless, this is what's colloquially known as a "shit sandwich".
- Increase distance and vacate the area as soon as possible. If they have a gun, run in a zig zag pattern and seek cover (blocks bullets) or concealment (hides you, but doesn't stop bullets).
- Once you are safe, then report the incident to law enforcement (if they'll do anything).
You mean well, but this is Hollywood-grade advice for close quarters encounters.
Arms extended gives you the least possible leverage. Like when cops in movies run around with gun drawn at arms' length (the Weaver stance is for target shooting). To disarm a gun-wielding opponent, you want to get in close, grab the weapon from both sides securely (hug it) and do a dead drop. Unless you're fighting The Rock, they can't hold both you and the weapon. Unless you are The Rock, you'll probably get killed grappling with them any other way.
Don't do this for knives. Just stay the length of two arms + 1 beer bottle away from them.
I don't have any advice for swords but anyone who comes at you with one isn't playing by conventional rules, so run like hell.
The zig zag thing is a myth. It works in Counter-Strike, but you'll just end up dying an embarrassing death in reality. The only zig zagging you should be doing is from cover to cover. Get to cover as directly as possible. This isn't The OA...interpretive dance won't save you.
PROTIP: As cover goes, cars are made of the same stuff as beer cans and glass. The IC engine block is the only part that will actually stop a bullet. EVs are explosive.
> certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities
For those interested in the topic, I recommend Loewen's "Sundown Towns". My copy's on loan, but I think it's in Ch 11, "The Effects of Sundown Towns on Whites" that he talks about the culture among descendants of white-flight suburbanites, their low-to-no-experience views on the horrors of the city, where Those People run rampant. Many are terrified of even going to cities. To people who actually live in the cities, their view is almost unrecognizable.
As an example from something in my feed reader today [1], take Theo Wold, a former Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy (under Trump) and current Idaho Solicitor General. He quote-tweeted a photo of a white woman hugging two Black men. They were the Tennessee Three, the state legislators who were under threat of expulsion for protest.
His comment: "Every Red State will have to wrestle with the fetid, urban Leftist vote sinks. That begins with asking the question: why does the GOP continue to push the annexation/development of rural land that only grows the size and power of Leftist strongholds?"
Fetid stronghold sinks! Sounds pretty bad. In our favor, at least we have taco trucks on every corner.
It reminds me of nothing so much as this bit from Chairman Mao: "It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres and other people in the cities should be persuaded to send their sons and daughters who have completed junior or senior middle school, college or university, to the countryside. Let us mobilize."
Considering that a large population of sf tech is migrants, many people, myself included, compare it not to other American cities but to European and Asian ones.
I would say that the comparison is apt - since we compare the tech/science successes of SF with the rest of the world, we should also compare the crime rates with it.
It might be helpful for you to take a class on gun safety to reduce the anxiety you have about seeing guns. Remember, the police also open carry because peaceful open carry is primarily about deterrence.
Brandishing a weapon is legally different from open carry, and is already a crime. Brandishing means to draw or exhibit the weapon in a threatening manner, or to use it in a fight, other than in lawful self-defense.
What an absolutely asinine thing to champion. How does that do any good to actually help with "policy" as your initial comment seems to intend? All you seem to be doing is acting like "I'm smarter than all of you!"
SF is a dangerous city. That seems to be the main point of concern here.
Well if we’re inventing types of danger out of whole cloth and proposing solutions to them they probably won’t help with anything. We also should probably quantify what “dangerous” means if, as both that post and the article say, violent crime in San Francisco is actually exceptionally low.
No one is denying crime is a problem. The point is that people were quick attribute this tragedy to yet another unprovoked attack, which turned out to be false. But it fit the narrative, so it was believed to be true.
It's not just this tragedy, it's any tragedy. Every time there's a mass shooting, people use it as a rallying cry for more gun control, rather than focusing on fixing the issues that actually led to the violence (usually severe mental health issues), as if people haven't used knives or vehicles to commit mass murder/violence. Never let a good tragedy go to waste, so the saying goes.
A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife. Seems like it's always a gun. Probably because a gun makes it really easy to kill people quickly.
Six people were killed and 14 injured after a knife-wielding man stabbed passersby on a pedestrian shopping street in the eastern Chinese city of Anqing:
I don't consider two of those to be good comparisons to mass shootings of the "kill dozens of people in a couple minutes" variety.
The Saskatchewan stabbings were attacks at 13 separate locations across a sparsely populated reservation rather than a single mass casualty event.
The Sagamihara stabbings were attacks on sleeping disabled patients inside a care home. It reminds me more of Angel of Death type mass killings (by nurses / doctors). He considered it to be euthanasia and the weapon could have been a pillow - the mass killing was not down to the deadliness of the weapon but the passivity of the victims.
The Anqing attack is a better example - a single event against conscious victims. Nevertheless, mass stabbings across the whole globe are rarer than the daily mass shootings in the US.
"A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife.
The Canadian incident took place over days and 13 different locations. The other two incidents don't say how long they took but it just takes way longer to kill people with a knife than a gun.
I am not fully researched on this topic, but as a lay observer it appear that the gun rights side basically categorizes anyone who is willing to commit a mass shooting as mentally ill, and hence every mass shooting is a result of mental illness by definition. But it does not follow that mass shooters are mentally ill by any professional standards.
If this is a valid premise, then you know you are doing something wrong as a society. Mass shootings are common place in the US (with currently 177 mass shootings this year so far). This is not normal.
US isn't even close to the top of the list for mass shootings in the world and it is not "common place". Most "mass" shootings, which could be just three individuals, are gang related and added to the data for mass shootings.
Not even three. GVA includes a lot of incidents with just two individuals being shot, so long as at least two other people are present for the incident.
It’s actually nothing like that at all. People keep bringing it up because the US has the second highest number of gun related deaths of any country in the entire world.
hermitdev claimed that if guns weren't available, people would use knives or cars instead. So the fact that gun related deaths are higher in the US is irrelevant. And they do have a point: knife murders are more common in Europe than they are in the US.
But not by much. The fact that the murder rate in the US is 7X the murder rate in Europe is a much more relevant statistic.
The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.
There is not any evidence what so ever that a person who might commit a murder with a gun would just use the next available option to them such as a knife. That was something that was just introduced to the discussion as a fact when in reality it’s something you have made up.
In fact it’s immediately clear that to most people they are two very different things precisely because one of them is literally just pushing a button.
There is a reason why the murder rate is 7x higher because the access to guns requires a much lower buy in to commit the act in the first place.
Hence why people argue for stricter gun control laws. Mass access is precisely the problem.
There's much less opportunity to attack someone with a knife and it involves a lot more personal risk. You're likely to get stabbed back unless they're totally unprepared. It's much more difficult to do a "drive by knifing".
1. You can't remove all guns, you can only remove the legal ones.
2. If you had the ability to remove illegal guns from society you would have had the ability to remove the criminals in the first place.
3. Even if you did remove the millions of guns and prevent manufacturing / imports (even though you can't for drugs) you don't know for certain murders will go down. These people are ruthless. Jumping people with machetes is always an option. It may be worse since guns are an equalizer and let people defend themselves. You're a lot less likely to run up on someone when you know they have a gun.
~25% of the murders in the US are already committed without guns, so even if you removed gun crime outright and no one decided to commit the same crime with a different weapon, the US would still have ~2x the murder rate of Europe. Not that this is a case against gun control, as we're still (very theoretically) saving ~15,000 lives a year. But it does suggest that there is a cause for the differing rates that is not related to guns.
Here's the murder weapon statistics for 2019 from the FBI[1]. This only includes homicides for which the weapon is known. We'll assume that the rest match the distribution, though I suspect if you can't identify the weapon, there probably aren't bullet holes.
Summing total homicides gives 13,927. Summing total firearm homicides gives 10,258. 10,258/13,927 = 77.15%. I admit I did not do initially do that work and instead summed percentages from this infographic[2], arriving at 26.3% non-firearm homicide. I can't explain the discrepancy, as they point to the same data. The total homicide count is 5 higher on the FBI site, so possibly the page was updated later on. I point this out to clarify that I rounded the percentage down, which is why I felt comfortable with .25 * 7 ~= 2, though the answer with the new percentage is 1.59. I'd round to 1.5 if I did it again.
If you want a source for Europe's homicide rate being 1/7 that of the US, you'll have to ask the person I was replying to. Wikipedia[3] says Europe's murder rate is 3.0 and the US is 6.5, but I expect the person here was restricting it to the EU or something else along those lines (also various sources differ, and it's something that changes over time). I don't think the restriction changes either of our points, as long as the 7x number does really exist.
I can't recall ever having seen an NRA ad but I don't imagine my comment sounds anything like one. If the NRA really does say in their ads that they're not making a case against gun control and that it could save 15,000 lives a year, I don't have a problem sounding like them.
We both understand the concept that the US has more than 1 major social problem at the same time right and that other countries also have comparable levels of gang membership but wildly different murder rates.
So everyone who is currently killing each other with guns will see their enemy gang in the street and not decide to slash them because they are too lazy? They only wanted to shoot them?
It's the type of gangs in America, it's not about "gang membership" or whatever metric you're trying to throw out.
They shank people with tooth brushes in prison. MS-13 decapitates people with axes. It's the gangs, not the guns.
Chicago and many cities in America would be safer with more legal guns, less gangsters.
The problem with saying that SF has relatively low violent crime is that it ignores the constant, extremely aggressive verbal assault that people are just accustomed to. In the years I lived there, I had people scream at me that they were going to kill/stab/etc. me at least a couple of dozen times (I would describe this as violent crime). Of course, if you call SFPD, they'll just tell you it's not an issue and ignore you, so those don't go into any statistics.
You're right, "violent crime" is a term of art that involves the commission of a…crime. "Verbal assault" is not assault. I guess if you don't like the vibes in a place, you can go somewhere else, but trying to use such things to influence how people talk about or perceive actual, no, for real crime is intellectual malpractice.
You've got a really weird black and white view of these things. As long as people aren't literally murdering you then it's ok? The idea that "real crime" only happens AFTER the actual crime has taken place is super bizarre. That's not how the world works.
Go find me a city that has people that are super happy and nice to each other and also has a high murder rate. Wait, I bet you can't.
Talking about the petty crime and the "vibe" is absolutely on topic for this, because that sort of laissez-faire attitude leads to murders like the one we're discussing.
>Talking about the petty crime and the "vibe" is absolutely on topic for this, because that sort of laissez-faire attitude leads to murders like the one we're discussing.
... you mean the murder in question that, as we've found out in this article/thread, has nothing to do with the "petty crime" and "vibe" that you're referring to?
Still seems like a good opportunity to me to bring up the general "whatever" nature in SF regarding crime. Perhaps this stabbing took place because the assailant felt more brazen knowing that the police in that city won't do anything?
Let's just let the homeless and the mentally deranged do whatever they want in SF. That's definitely a good way to run a modern city. Better than hurting their feelings! /s
>Let's just let the homeless and the mentally deranged do whatever they want in SF. That's definitely a good way to run a modern city. Better than hurting their feelings! /s
If that's the takeaway you're getting from this comment chain, I really don't know what else to tell you.
> Go find me a city that has people that are super happy and nice to each other and also has a high murder rate. Wait, I bet you can't.
Many Mexican and Brazilian cities have much higher murder rates and people are still generally happier and nicer than in the US, especially if SF is the basis for comparison.
Your comments are disingenuous. A decline in the quality of life in a city due to crime, substance abuse, homelessness and untreated mental health disorders has an immense affect on one’s well being. That goes doubly so for people with spouses and children.
If you are confronted by a mentally ill person screaming threats at you, is your first thought to seek comfort in the violent crime stats? You must be some kind of robot, if so.
Threatening to assault someone is, in fact, a real crime. You cannot, legally, go around "screaming that you're going to kill/stab/etc." people. Looks like Penal Code 422, if you need a concrete reference for California specifically
The problem is you actually don't understand what assault is. Assault does not involving actually touching someone - that's battery. What you're describing as verbal assault is actually assault and is a real crime, generally considered to be violent crime in crime statistics.
We should convince the SF tourism board to use this motto. Come to San Francisco, where our vibe is constant threats of murder but you probably won't actually get murdered!
Just to offer a counter-anecdote: In 8 years of living in SOMA, which has the 2nd highest crime rate after Tenderloin, nobody has even once threatened to kill me. Or even hinted at wanting me harm.
Property crime is a different story. That has indeed been a problem.
Why even offer a counter-anecdote? Are you trying to give the impression to impressionable people that not every person gets threatened with murder on a regular basis here? That’s true, but it seems like you’re just trying to discount one person’s lived experience. I know women that get groped on MUNI regularly but not every woman gets groped on MUNI. People don’t usually threaten me, but I’ve stopped people from threatening others in front of me. Hell, I’ve stopped a guy from trying to roll another guy sleeping on the street into oncoming traffic. Nobody has ever stolen my phone from me, but that doesn’t mean phones have never been stolen from people.
And before you go to the stats, just remember something: lies, damned lies and statistics. If the police don’t get involved, there’s no police report. If the DA doesn’t charge a crime, there’s no “crime” even if there actually is. Homicides and property crimes tend to leave the most evidence behind, but those aren’t the only crimes that matter and even the criminal amounts of piss and shit around just the MUNI and BART stations probably isn’t generating any police reports either. Verbal harassment and threats also don’t tend to generate enough of the right kind of paperwork to make it into the stats, but it doesn’t make it less real.
Against a deliberately facetious post someone made that was a follow-on to a follow-on of somebody else’s anecdote?
Let me put it this way: needing to counter an anecdote with your own comes across as unsympathetic at worst and apathetic at best. “Yeah that happened to you, so what? It doesn’t happen to me!” kinda vibes.
It happens enough that too many people have these stories about San Francisco. They’re the kinds of things that can happen anywhere, but San Francisco is one of the places where it is talked about as happening a lot.
I think what gets me is the underlying classism that oozes out of these conversations everywhere I turn. People here (in SFBA) are oh so liberal and progressive ... as long as the undesirables aren't in _their_ neighborhood. Then suddenly everyone's pearl clutching.
For the most part they mean you no harm. Just because people are poor, doesn't mean they're dangerous.
One of the dumbest examples was when a neighbor asked me to stop putting cardboard boxes in recycling because "it attracts the bad element and then they camp in our street". Ffs man they're homeless, let them have a damn box.
The homeless people you're advocating for are the worst victims of the homeless people being criticized in this thread. You do no favors for people who happen to be poor by providing cover for the crazies.
If there were more being done about the people threatening violence, intentionally urinating on passersby, molesting women, accosting people in the streets, your neighbor would likely be less concerned about the cardboard box people.
My first time in SOMA I had a homeless guy almost piss on my shoes followed by another guy shadow-stabbing with a real knife and pointing at me. Let's call it a mulligan.
You're wrong. Verbal assault is assault, and is violence, because it leads to the reasonable expectation of violence. You don't know if the crazy person threatening to kill you will actually try to do it so you have to imagine that they will.
You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment and have been breaking them in other places too. We ban accounts that post like this, so would you please stop?
You just learn to tune it out. Crazy people gonna crazy. It's like the announcements that come over the PA at airports for "Please report any unattended baggage - if you see something, say something", or 99% of what the news media writes, or Putin's threats to nuke the West, or the breathless pitches of startup founders that they're going to change the world.
> It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad!
Steven Pinker has made a career out of this. Ironically a lot of his adherents are quick to jump on the "this is the safest time in human history" statistical warbling when discussing an issue they feel doesn't personally affect them.
Steven Pinker made claims about humanity as a whole. We can definitely be in the safest period in human history while at the same time having some cities that are pretty dangerous
It’s impossible to reason with anyone from SF who thinks the city isn’t that bad. Reality is most large cities are absolute trash now. But at least where i live i can talk with people who aren’t living in some reality distortion field
>It’s impossible to reason with anyone from SF who thinks the city isn’t that bad. Reality is most large cities are absolute trash now. But at least where i live i can talk with people who aren’t living in some reality distortion field
I'm 56 years old and have lived in NYC for most of my life. And I can tell you (and provide appropriate statistics if you're unwilling or unable to look for that easily available data) that NYC (I can't speak to SF, although my brother and his family lived there for many years -- including in the Tenderloin -- and I found it a delightful place) is enormously safer and cleaner than it was for the first 35 or so years of my life.
When I was a child, there were street gangs in most neighborhoods, people would put signs on their car windows noting the lack of valuables inside in hopes of not having their windows smashed (In one case, circa 1978-80 I saw a car with its window smashed and the little sign that had been on the window saying "no radio, nothing of value, and the perpetrator of the vandalism wrote "just checking" on the sign). You almost never see that any more.
Streetwalkers were in most neighborhoods (even the nice neighborhoods), leaving used condoms to litter the streets every morning, Times Square was a shithole. No Disney store -- mostly just porn shops and peep shows, and with con artists, robbers and other miscreants.
Cocaine (crack, mostly) was openly sold on street corners even in wealthy neighborhoods.
Homicides in 2020 were less than 1/3 what they were in 1980[0] (and while that number increased significantly in 1987, that was because of a change in classification when "cause of death" was "unknown", the death being classed as "homicide" whereas previously, those were not included in "homicides" previously[1].
So, no. Large cities (and SF among them -- although NYC is, on a per-capita basis even safer than SF) in the US are, for the most part, enormously safer than they were even 15 years ago.
And since you don't seem to have much of an idea of what's really going on (and maybe don't care if it doesn't fit your trained-in prejudices?), I'll give you a tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!
[1] I searched around a bit, but couldn't find anything online, but that's true for a lot of news from before 2005 or so. But it was big news, because (see graph in [0] above) "homicides" increased significantly due to this change.
> It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.
"You can be mad but I guess I don’t personally view my car as an extension of myself and I’ve never really felt violated any of the 15 or so times my car was broken in to. Once a guy accidentally left a cool knife in my car so if it keeps happening you might get a little treat." --Seth Rogen
I’ve been accosted by strange people in multiple cities if that’s the standard of disorder now. Not saying it’s nice for that to happen but I don’t think it says much about SF.
>I’ve been accosted by strange people in multiple cities if that’s the standard of disorder now. Not saying it’s nice for that to happen but I don’t think it says much about SF.
As have I. One of the most serious was at the bus station in the huge metropolis of Santa Cruz, CA[0] (population ~63,000 in 2020).
As I've said elsewhere many, many times: There are assholes everywhere.
I also lived in San Francisco. Was never threatened by a random weirdo. Lived in a different city and was threatened (he said he would beat me to death). But somehow the city I live doesn't have constant bellyaching about how dangerous it is despite having a higher violent crime rate than San Francisco.
>It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.
You are making the poster's exact point for them. Take a step back, breathe, think.
And as other folks in this topic are pointing out, anecdotes like that are simply misleading. San Francisco is not a high crime US city. Period. It is not. It is middle-of-the-pack at worst. Nor is it getting "worse faster". It saw a crime wave across the pandemic that is receding now, just like most of the world.
It's just wrong. You're wrong. Any narrative to the effect of "SF is unsafe because of ..." is wrong, because SF is not unsafe in any measurable way.
And more to the point: those very (wrong) narratives are simply out of control among the prevailing demographic here on HN. And frankly it's getting kinda toxic.
Well, no. SF is not unsafe in any measured way. You can easily observe from this thread, anecdotally, the police routinely ignore people shouting threats and other crimes. It's entirely possible that if we actually measured all of those, and counted them as the crimes that they are, that SF would look remarkably worse.
Do police measure "shouting threats and other crimes" anywhere, though? You're literally inventing a new category of crime just to be able to claim SF is the worst. Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?
Blunt counter-hypothesis: Tech bros are a bunch of suburban snowflakes who never lived in a dense urban environment before and are addressing their culture clash with hate instead of understanding. This is anecdotally true in my experience, which means I'm right by your logic, no?
> You're literally inventing a new category of crime
There are actual laws against threatening people I'm not inventing anything. I grew up in a major city with plenty of crime problems, and I still absolutely expected police to respond to someone who had a knife and was threatening to kill people. Clearly things have gotten worse if they're now ignoring such crimes.
> Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?
First, I never claimed SF was the worse - I simply said we don't have enough information to make reasonable conclusions in either direction.
Second, Occam's razor says that if the crime statistics are the same in two cities, but we have a ton of anecdotal evidence that one city is ignoring certain crimes, then that latter city probably has a higher crime rate.
If we had page after page of anecdotes that SF techies are just snowflakes and what they're responding to is totally normal, that would obviously change the equation.
Of course, keep in mind, if you're right, we've simply established that EVERY major urban center has a huge problem of "crazy people threatening people on a regular basis", and that's still an incredibly undesirable situation that we want to fix.
I'd also be curious why I don't hear about people from New York, London, Seattle, etc. reporting that it's totally normal for crazy people to threaten them with a knife. Surely there are techbro snowflakes in Seattle, at a minimum?
No, it would be the narrative where multiple HN commenters in the previous thread took this as a launching point to call for a full authoritarian crackdown of the homeless.
Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.
But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.
> even the best city in the US is still relatively bad
Your parent didn't mention the "best city in the US" though? Per the linked table it seems to be Irvine CA at 0.72 per 100k, which would be below average in the UK or France.
Takes the American "unwalkable city" trope to the extreme - you can't even really bike there. People live in isolate subdivisions (gated, often) connected to the outside world by mega-arterials with 6+ lanes.
It's not surprising it ranks so low in murders - it's hard to get killed when you're only outside for the time it takes to walk from your parking spot to the shop.
By comparison, there were 93 murders in 2022 in the West Midlands (the UK region encompassing Birmingham, UK). That's a rate of 1.56 per 100,000 population, which I agree is pretty bad - but it's almost 50x less than the equivalent for the US city.
I grew up in St Louis. We didn't worry so much about murder for cause as someone had to specifically dislike you (cheating on/with spouse for example). We just watched the street crime rates.
That said moving to the west coast people freak out all the time about yearly murder rates that are a weekend in STL.
A lot depends a lot on distribution, which surface level stats don't reveal. I've lived in very high crime rates that were perfectly safe because it was a mixture of 'don't go to these areas' and basic interpersonal stuff. I've also lived in areas that were far safer on paper, but were substantially more dangerous for me because crime was far more 'equal opportunity.' I've no idea of the situation in San Francisco but this could easily explain the perception : stats relationship.
Exactly, murder stats aren't necessarily a good measure of how safe a city feels to a typical dweller. Many city homicides are gang-related, and if the gangs only operate in specific areas, killing eachother, the city can still feel totally safe to other people. Constant theft really weighs on the psyche- needing to worry about everywhere you leave your bike locked or park your car is a burden.
To your point, Ulaanbaatar felt like one of the more dangerous cities I've been in because people would rob foreigners in broad daylight on crowded streets, but I don't think there was much homicide at all.
> Constant theft really weighs on the psyche- needing to worry about everywhere you leave your bike locked or park your car is a burden.
This was my experience living in Chicago. While violent crime was much higher than on the West Coast, it was highly localized and it remained true that if you didn’t go looking for trouble, it usually wouldn’t find you. There is affordable housing and the social safety net hasn’t completely collapsed so there are many fewer cases of out of control mentally ill folks on the streets.
Meanwhile, petty property crime felt like it was much lower. Car break-ins definitely happened but it was not at all endemic like it seems to be in LA or SF. Although I’ve heard this has changed if you own a Hyundai or Kia due to a security vulnerability in many of those cars permitting easy hot-wiring. The new security patches rolling out will fix that problem, I hope.
There are several neighborhoods in Chicago with almost all the amenities of NYC/SF, low crime, but much lower cost of living. Although housing costs in those neighborhoods have gone up quite a bit as more and more remote workers figure this out.
(yes, it gets cold sometimes, but you can always take some of that money you saved by moving and get on a plane somewhere warm)
Per capita rates are often hard to compare (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any conclusions). I find the rates often have more with how boundaries are drawn and are especially inaccurate for smaller populations as a reflection of overall safety. There's probably an element of that in the St. Louis numbers.
I once saw a crime map of the boroughs in a city where I lived. It showed the downtown as way higher than others per-capita, but it's because few live there as it's mostly commercial, more than higher absolute numbers. Lots of effects like this skew the numbers.
Yeah, Saint Louis is a weird case because it has a really tight boundary compared to most cities, so the crime numbers you see are all about the urban core and don't include data from the suburbs.
This NYT article has some numbers comparing "metro areas" rather than cities, and it knocks Saint Louis down a few slots (while still leaving it amongst the worst in the nation, for sure): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/upshot/crime-statistics-s...
Sweden is in the middle of a gang crisis with people murdered every week... still, the murder rate over the last several years has always been below 1.23 (the highest value, in 2020).
According to this[1], Sweden had 116 murders in 2022, less than the peak in 2020, which was 124. Basic maths tells me that' around 1.104 murders per 100K people (current population is 10.5 million).
Also worth noting that SF contains most of the Bay Area’s high-crime areas, yet the city limits are much smaller than those of most major American cities. So that skews the crime rate upwards. There’s a similar dynamic at play with several other American cities.
The line drawing was a policy decision, and it makes regional level policymaking near impossible, creating adverse incentives for suburban jurisdictions and constraining the options of local policymakers in SF. It’s the cause of many of the Bay Area’s current social woes.
The list of counties with the highest rates of violence listed on that article are all southern and rural and not known to be associated with gang activity that I am aware of.
> _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]
On this list of homicides per capita [1], San Francisco ranks far higher than Austin in incidents per capita of "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter": 2.57 per 100,000 people in Austin, vs. 6.35 per 100,000 in SF.
It also ranks higher than New York, Portland, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle.
Thanks for that. I admit to buying the narrative. Part of that is because my nearest city of any substance is Portland, and it's not especially violent. SF does look more violent compared to Portland, but objectively SF is actually just average or less. Lots of big cities are more violent[0].
I grew up in a violent town (high murder rate - even blatant). The difference between that and SF is that you don’t personally experience that violence in my home town. It’s really quite rare it affects someone you know. It’s even rarer for it to be direct.
SF is different. Within my first year there i had already seen someone shot in front my building (i didn’t witness it but the aftermath). An asian friend was slapped and her phone taken - she’d have given the phone anyway so the slap felt unnecessary. You fear parking your car - not trembling in your pants fear but a dread that you’ll have to deal with that shit again (now the breakins happen while you’re still in the car). You don’t know when someone is yelling on the street whether they are harmless or gonna attack you - doesn’t have to be a weapon just yelling at your face with saliva splattering all over you would traumatise you enough - yup, that happened too. My girlfriend and I used to try to help them. We’d give them leftover food - bakery items mostly. We’d see that all tossed on sidewalk when we walk that way again. There was always glass on the sidewalk. There’d be random tents you’ll have to get around. This is daily and adds up.
Like I said, I grew up in a violent town. So avoiding travel at night or going around the house locking windows or being aware of the approaching blind dark spot is something I’m used to. Most everyone around me was not. Even those from the Bay Area haven’t seen. I used to think they were weak but the truth is no one has to put up with it and I think people have the right to “feel” safe as well.
(Again, none if this will show up in a statistic and I’m not saying these people should be locked up in the name of tough on crime either. These are absolutely property crimes and quality of life crimes but you do feel fear and dread almost everyday)
I grew up outside of one of the most violent cities in New York State[1]. My high school was right in the middle of Newburgh, NY, and being a teenager, I spent a lot of time driving around the downtown area at night. There were a handful of blocks you stayed away from and you were good. Granted, this is with the benefit of a car, rather than walking around.
Ultimately, random acts of violence are scary but even in the "most dangerous cities" statistically rare. The politicization of city violence "What about Chicago? What about SF?" is an instant red flag that whomever you're speaking with is making a bad faith argument.
> I grew up in a violent town (high murder rate - even blatant). The difference between that and SF is that you don’t personally experience that violence in my home town. It’s really quite rare it affects someone you know.
If it has a high murder rate, that obviously is not true for all values of “you”.
I went to Portland for a week last year. I saw 6 different instances of a violent, obviously mentally ill, presumably homeless person physically attack a random person (once at a restaurant, twice at a tram station, thrice on the street, all broad daylight). That was more instances that I had seen in 5 years in Philadelphia, a city jokingly referred to as Killadelphia.
Portland might not have a lot of gang violence (which is what really gets numbers up), but not violent isn't how I would describe the city.
I've lived in the vicinity of Portland for almost 50 years and haven't seen as much violence as you did in one week. You must have been hanging in really rough area of town, or just got very unlucky.
I spent 1.5 days in downtown PDX (roughly around the Portland City Grill) recently and my experiences roughly match the OP.
It was shockingly bad. Crazy, violent people "everywhere". Tents covering the sidewalks. There wasn't a parking garage around where there weren't piles of human excrement.
This was staying in Downtown and the "Lloyd District" I suppose it was called. Leaving those areas did seem a bit better, but it was still pretty bad. In the same time frame I was in downtown Newark, Trenton, Baltimore, Detroit, NYC. Portland was by far the worst of the bunch.
>but not violent isn't how I would describe the city.
It depends on where you are in the city. I live in Portland and I don't think I've someone get attacked in the entire time I've lived here. But I also live in an area that is less popular with the mentally ill and drug addicted
Homicides has gone up during the pandemic--56 in 2022 vs 41 in 2019. I think NYC also went up, but NYC is still safer than SF (5 deaths per 100k vs 6.9 per 100k for SF).
Yep, and when we sort cities by population density, it's a good bit higher than 37th. SF has plenty of problems, but apparently violent crime isn't the most noteworthy of them.
Citing murder rates (and ignoring other crimes) is one of the preferred tactics of people who want to say that big cities have low crime rates.
Police in big cities go after big crimes like murders, but tend to ignore "lesser" crimes, so as a result, gangsters and other career criminals stick to those lesser crimes, and generally do a lot more of them.
No, because they don't correlate with violent crime rates, which are also tracked. Murder is actually a really weird crime: if basically never happens between people who don't know each other.
A useful source was literally cited in the comment I replied to. Look at rankings of cities by crime. You will find SF and NYC close to the bottom of the pack on murders, but toward the top on property crimes and low-level violent crimes.
You completely misrepresented what they would prosecute, literally from the article you linked to:
> marijuana misdemeanors, including selling more than three ounces; not paying public transportation fare; trespassing except a fourth degree stalking charge, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration in certain cases, and prostitution
Literally nothing you insinuated. Please stop peddling lazy lies and ideas.
You might want to read the primary source before accusing someone of lying. Misdemeanor assault and petty theft are also on the list. I admit that I chose a left-leaning article to cite so that people like you would read something rather than dismissing it outright as biased, but the primary source is linked there. CNN, apparently peddlers of "lazy lies" themselves, chose not to put the full list down.
You didn’t link anything to prove your point. And you’re literally blaming CNN for how you spun the article? I’ll stop here because it’s clear you’re irrational.
The article I liked to you had a link in it to the primary source at the very top of the article. Read the primary source. Every secondary source spins everything - always go back to the primary source if you want the news.
By the way, the full list of crimes that are not getting prosecuted is very long (covering a lot of misdemeanors and a few felonies), and CNN wanted to write an uplifitng story, so they chose the crimes that I presume are popular to not prosecute. It's not that complicated to understand the bias, and I'm not suggesting that anyone has done anything malicious. I only said that they were "peddling 'lazy lies'" because that source did exactly what you accused me of (misrepresenting what they will and won't prosecute).
A lot of people (particularly on this forum) try this form of lazy argumentation where they ask for sources for any claim they don't like so they can go try to poke holes in one source or another without actually doing any research. If you want to argue about something, go do some research and stop accusing other people of "lying" and "irrationality." What you are doing here is a textbook example of arguing in bad faith.
It's not a bad deal at all, if that's what they stick to. It's really mostly non-violent thefts these days. That still doesn't make the area "low-crime" or "safe."
The thing that's so weird about that confirmation bias is that some folks held these inconsistent views even within a single HN comment.
There was a comment that was on that initial thread where the commenter said that they heard from "very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit", and the commenter still went on to blame San Francisco for being a "crime ridden shithole". I responded with this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456746 , it was just bizarre to me.
That's not what the comment I was replying to was saying. It's possible for both to be true, but it's definitely cognitive dissonance to on one hand think "it was a hit" and then at the same time blame the general crime problems of San Francisco for Bob Lee's death.
That's what a lot of the replies here seem to be missing. Sure, I think SF has a pretty bad crime problem that needs to be addressed. What deserves opprobrium is all the tech elite who immediately spouted on Twitter and elsewhere that the government of SF had "blood on their hands", again specifically blaming SF government and SF's overall crime environment for Bob Lee's death.
The number of high profile tech bros on Twitter using the death to further their own views was disgraceful. SF may have big issues but using someone’s murder to further your political beliefs is horrible. I’m sure we won’t hear any retraction though.
Watching from outside, the whole "Tech Bros vs. Woke Hippies" framing is just nuts. It's at most a local politics dispute over control over the SF city government. And yet it's spilled over into all kinds of radicalized global thinking.
People like pg and Garry are out there on twitter acting like the nutjobs trying to deny their startup workers housing and teach their kids about colonialism as a history paradigm are the Greatest Threat To Free Speech Worldwide.
Is it time now to maybe take a deep breath and think about maybe calling a truce? The hippies can be rough to live with but really they aren't so bad. I know a bunch.
I guess, if viewed cynically. It seems more likely to me that he was sincere, just wrong. That's the "radicalized" bit I was talking about. The SF tech scene has a smell right now that seems to me a lot like what we saw with the Gamergate incels a decade ago. And that... didn't lead to good places.
Radicalization happens to everyone, even the rationalists. Maybe it's just time to cool off.
The piss on the homeless views always get aired whenever a homeless person does something bad, or is accused, without evidence of doing something bad.
It's couched in 'the woke are ruining everything letting murderhobos run rampart' rhetoric. Sometimes with a helping of 'the police are completely unable to function if we subject them to any oversight, or hold them accountable to the rule of law.'
You see this take very frequently on <your local city subreddit>.
If you talk to actual cops, they're burnt out and quiet quitting like the rest of us. Scope creep has been marching steadily over the past decades: we're asking them to do too much; they're not trained for many of the kinds of interactions that they find so taxing. It would be better for everyone if they offloaded that work to others who are better qualified. This means giving police less money, and giving other services more money.
> using someone’s murder to further your political beliefs is horrible.
Agree that it's gross but we do it all the time, and I think too often it only feels horrible to people when the political beliefs aren't align with one's own. If the loudest voices in this incident had been pushing for increased funding for supportive housing or mental health services, would Joe Eskenazi have written an article titled "Bob Lee deserved better than to be killed — and then co-opted in death"? I kind of doubt it...
It was really surreal, reading through that thread and watching everyone assume they knew exactly what happened when there had literally been no public information given out about the suspect.
My wife asked me "how do we know the killer was a homeless guy?". I could only reply - "good point".
I think a part of it is people are fed up with how the city has deteriorated and no amount of gaslighting will change that fact. So, when he was killed it seemed like just another thing in the decline of the city.
I thought the reason was that someone had looked at CCTV footage of the event, and saw someone who looked homeless. Of course, most of us software engineers proudly go for the "clean homeless" look.
Post any story - tech, biotech, engineering, finance, war - and half the comments are people confident they know “the real story” and how everyone is wrong.
Agreed! It was really disgusting how everyone immediately turned the news of his passing into political posts designed to trash the entire city of San Francisco, when it was obviously too soon for anyone to know the full story behind his unfortunate death.
I hope this news brings his family and friends some closure.
> While Lee is one of a dozen homicide victims in San Francisco this year, his is the only killing that has garnered national coverage — or, in most cases, even cursory local coverage.
> San Francisco’s other homicide victims in 2023 are Gavin Boston, 40; Irving Sanchez-Morales, 28; Carlos Romero Flores, 29; Maxwell Maltzman, 18; Demario Lockett, 44; Maxwell Mason, 29; Humberto Avila, 46; Gregory McFarland Jr, 36; Kareem Sims, 43; Debra Lynn Hord, 57; and Jermaine Reeves, 52.
Maybe this speaks to me being in a worse location, but I'm sitting here thinking "it's April and this major city has only had twelve homicides? That's pretty great!"
A ton of people care about property crime and I don't think you should look down on them.
SF has 3-5x the property crime of most major cities in the United States. I imagine most violent crime is targeted (i.e. the victim is not a random person walking down the street), but property crime is scary because it can happen to the best of us, our friends and our family, in even the "safest" neighborhoods. We all know friends whose cars have been broken into. And it's easy to imagine --- what if my kids were at home during one of these home break-ins? (Note that burglaries are not classified as violent crime in SF)
You're performing a sleight of hand. No city census or national crime analysis categorizes burglary as a violent crime, and I'm not sure why you called SF out on it.
I don't look down on people complaining about property crime, I'd just like them to be honest about what they are complaining about.
SF is 55 out of the biggest 100 cities on burglary rates, by the way.
(It's interesting how all this is apparently a controversial take.)
> No city census or national crime analysis categorizes burglary as a violent crime, and I'm not sure why you called SF out on it.
Most other cities aren't wallowing in it the same way, and aren't holier than thou despite their polices clearly having caused the issue. But you're right, it's not just SF. LA and Seattle are pretty much right there too.
The crime cities like SF are worth calling out in a way that other violent cities aren't though because there's a giant epidemic of what we're pressured to call "non-violent crime" like shoplifting and car theft that gets violent instantly whenever the criminal doesn't get their way. I've personally seen people get shoved out of the way of a fleeing thief, and videos of people being attacked when they come back at the wrong time and discover their car being robbed. To say SF isn't violent ignores that the residents are on the edge of violence constantly.
> SF is 55 out of the biggest 100 cities on burglary rates, by the way.
These crime rates are what's reported by the police and they refuse to take reports of anything that hasn't escalated so they ignore most of what the everyday person suffers. These statistics should be seen more as evidence of collusion in the SFPD, not used to prove the safety of the city.
That's a strange way of spelling Cleveland, Memphis, Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Baltimore, Albuquerque, Detroit, Mobile, Cincinnati, Toledo, Des Moines, Seattle, Indianapolis, Spokane, St. Louis, San Bernadino, Bakersfield, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Durham, Orlando, Wichita... And I can't be bothered to list the next 30, all of whom also have more burglaries per capita than SF, and most of which also have more assaults, murders, and rapes.
LA is #73 on the burglary index, by the way.
You're making a lot of claims, and providing zero data for them.
> These crime rates are what's reported by the police and they refuse to take reports of anything that hasn't escalated
I live in two of the drug cities and visit others, and pay taxes that support many of these policies specifically. Do you live in one of the west-coast cities in question, or is this an abstract political battle for you? If you live here, do you feel you're a representative resident?
> if all you have is anecdotes, speculation and just-so stories?
Well, there's the crux of it, these are anecdotes that have happened to me personally. Over decades of experience and watching things change. And there's tons of data collected by victims but as has been pointed out, the news often chooses to report on acknowledged crime where a police officer has been sent out and taken a report. FB groups where people log violent street interactions or businesses' windows being broken show a definite uptick that government statistics don't. I know it's true because I walk past enough of those broken windows and stabbing sites to provide a reality check for what I'm seeing published.
We know that there are vastly more actual rapes than reported rapes and punished rapes. Why it is so unreasonable that there are vastly more actual attacks and robberies than reported?
> [other cities] all of whom also have more burglaries per capita than SF, and most of which also have more assaults, murders, and rapes.
Perception of livability despite violent crime has a lot to do with the localization of that crime. If only certain areas, at certain times, are dangerous - and if those areas are ones that can be avoided - then you can generally just go elsewhere with your family and be fine. That's the liberal way SF and such used to work. Sure, there were sleezy places but the street people would even helpfully and quietly warn tourists - "Hey bud, there's a lot of drugs down here, you should really take your kids a few blocks that way."
But once it spills over into random attacks outside that area, such that you can be killed at the busiest coffee shop in the city, the entire veneer of safety goes away.
We're saying two main things: that it got bad really quickly and predictably, and it's being officially downplayed.
> Please provide a shred of evidence that this doesn't happen in any of the other other cities listed in
It's somewhat annoying that what should be an issue of local policy ends up being purity-checked by people trying to decide if we're too partisan in national politics. We're talking about our policies, not trying to claim that other cities can't fail just as hard as we are but with a different set of errors.
That's great; in general, people should be, and I'm not looking down on them for doing so.
However, property crime is absolutely irrelevant when presented with the news of someone's murder, yet so many people here are quick to conflate them as somehow equivalent vis a vis personal safety, etc.
(Sidenote: I personally don't understand anyone thinking that property crime is "scary". Your car is not your kid. Your wallet is not your body. Your house is not your family. These things are not in the same class, and a loss in one category is not the same as a loss in the other. I'm not sure how one could argue otherwise, but it's apparently a widely-held worldview.)
A burglary is much scarier than someone stealing shit from your car, because someone invaded your living space in the latter. It's a much more serious invasion of your privacy than a broken window smash and grab.
The point I made in the sibling point stands, though. At 55th in the nation, SF does not have a high burglary rate. It has a high larceny (stealing from stores, cars, etc) rate.
I'm not comparing e.g. burglaries to car thefts, but the category of property crimes to the category of violent crimes. The former range from unfortunate nuisances to unpleasant material losses (depending on how well you've scoped your insurances); the latter can be life-shattering tragedies.
People (on the whole) aren't afraid of losing stuff. They're afraid of someone coming into their home or grabbing them on the street and things going south. If you somehow had a device which 100% guaranteed your personal safety (but somehow still allowed theft) then (for most people) most of these crimes would merely be an inconvenience/irritation on the same level as low level credit card fraud (where you lose no money but have to get a new card).
Your "legitimate question" is insulting to me and to those who actually are autistic. Everyone on HN is so nice.
No, I don't think being pickpocketed (or having my car stolen or whatever) is "equally as scary" as if my daughter were assaulted or kidnapped. I'd be ashamed to think they're equivalent, lest my daughter believe I view her as valuable as a hunk of steel or a wad of cash.
> Property crimes lead to a generally dangerous living area and people don't like to live in dangerous areas because it necessarily leads to more violent crime.
This is deeply incorrect. As has been repeated and cited over and over, violent crime in e.g. SF is not particularly high (lower than most other US cities), while its property crime rate is outrageously high.
I really don't understand your viewpoint here. You seem to be implying that property crime is fine and dandy and no one should really be worried about it because "having a child assaulted is worse!". Again, a bizarre world-view, hence the autism question.
Just because they're not emotionally equivalent doesn't mean that property crime isn't bad. SF has a massive issue regarding petty crime. It leads to a more dangerous city overall.
>Just because they're not emotionally equivalent doesn't mean that property crime isn't bad.
In sticking with the autism question - are you? OP has yet to state that "property crime isn't bad" yet you've commented repeatedly to imply that they have, among other things.
You've unfortunately been crossing into personal attack and name-calling repeatedly in your HN posts, as well as breaking the site guidelines in other ways. We ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so could you please stop?
It was a legitimate question. I truly don't understand how anyone can imagine property crime as "not scary". I was trying to get a better understanding of the person so that I would not be rude if he actually was neurodivergent.
It's extraordinarily hard to differentiate between trolls and non-trolls online anymore so I don't see what's wrong with asking that of someone.
Off-topic: That particular HN discussion contains many users creating a political narrative, and even at the time it was obvious there were many bad comments. I wish we had a way to downrank users that derail conversions with crap.
Are there forums with better user moderation systems that boost ranking of quality comments and decrease ranking of comment noise? Something where I can systematically increase the ranking of comments of users I respect (or I transitively respect), and decrease the ranking of comments for users that I see write crap. Ideally tagged (e.g. I want to uprank a particular users opinions on programming languages, but I want to strongly downrank their economic opinions)
> are there forums with better user moderation systems that boost ranking of quality comments and decrease ranking of comment noise? Something where I can systematically increase the ranking of comments of users I respect (or I transitively respect), and decrease the ranking of comments for users that I see write crap
It seems like you want a personalized filter bubble to confirm your pre-existing views and hide comments from anyone who even votes the same way as someone who contradicts your views. This is generally considered an anti-feature in public discussions, especially on HN. Calling all posts that you disagree with "crap" and ignoring them does a disservice to the conversation and to yourself.
The actual "crap" does get filtered out pretty well: the spam, slurs, trolling, low-effort jokes, and other things that derail the conversation. What you are calling "crap" are people's genuinely-held beliefs, some more coherently expressed than others, but which resonated with many others here. It is much better to engage than to ignore. I see that you didn't comment in that thread, which is a shame. Substantive disagreements are what move us all forward.
You might want to try Facebook, they do a really good job at keeping you in your preferred group's information cocoon.
You are right that it's not the content of the views here that are really the problem, or principally shouldnt be.
But the overriding, horrendous issue is how threads and discussions are hijacked for the sake of every other guy's soapbox, and this thread in question is particularly exemplary here.
I have certainly accepted at this point that, e.g., some people see homeless people or drug addicted people as essentially subhuman. And the mechanics of free speech and discourse dictate that I see such views as having a place in some discussions (especially on this particular website it seems), however much it contradicts what I see as fundamental humanity or whatever.
But, to me, it didn't really feel like the right time or context in that thread. But I maybe I am wrong!
Like, I definitely accept that I personally have to stomach a lot if I want to see the discourse on this site in general, and I agree I don't necessarily want the bubble. And indeed, this is just what "living in a society" is all about. But so much in that particular thread just really felt misplaced and fundamentally insensitive, however essentially valid they were themselves as views. And I think that thread is just a good example not a one off thing.
> personalized filter bubble to confirm your pre-existing views
I seek learning through intelligent and insightful rebuttal. HN is a good forum to learn from others directly, and indirectly by reading other people’s threads. I want a forum that does this better, via network effects of judgements about comment quality.
Your comment contains many baseless assumptions about my motivations. Is there irony in that this thread is not on Facebook, that you are attempting to disagree with my point but I am engaging with you, and that your comment likely breaks multiple guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HackerNews is still better than just about every site out there with this high of a profile. Once the bad faith trolls take up residence, discourse goes into the toilet. At least 99% of HN posters are earnestly trying to make a point they believe in. HN just isn't sexy enough to pull in the trolls.
Avoid non-tech discussion here and you are almost all the way there. There's a chrome extension to block a user's comments. Probably not too hard to make one or modify it to highlight users you like.
The argument I made to all my friends in this debate (but not publicly) was along the lines of “tech exec found dead at 2:30am near his home in an upscale neighborhood with zero night-time activity … that doesn’t sound random”
My guess was drug deal gone wrong. But tech deal gone wrong makes sense too, I guess.
edit: my drug guess was before the person was named, not implying anything, just know drugs are a popular hobby in SF
It could still have been a drug deal - some companies have a guy who is the "hookup."
The problem with the discourse was that everyone forgot that people basically never get randomly murdered. There's almost always a reason for a murder - number 1 is domestic disputes, number 2 is gang-related, and the list goes on, but almost nobody gets murdered randomly. Assaults and thefts are a different story, and SF's problem with those crimes got conflated with a murder (which is a rare crime in SF).
It’s an upscale building but I wouldn’t call it an upscale neighborhood, especially at night. It’s only a couple blocks from the bay bridge overpass and the overpass attracted some non-upscale activity.
At the same time though I’ve spent many late nights in the area and never had any negative encounters.
The story contradicts what so many here took as a given, that Lee was a victim of stochastic violence in SF. The highlighting is in revealing that so many were wrong in applying their biases to the original news, and then using that to leverage into e.g. condemnations of the city in general.
I mean we all know the reality was that people who don’t like the very liberal politics of SF were reasoning backwards to get to the “liberal politics causes murder” confirmation they crave. I don’t think anyone even pretended that condemnation of the city was a new conclusion for them.
The Internet has made it virtually impossible for people to say "I just don't know yet." Everyone feels like if they don't immediately come to a conclusion they're like left out or something.
I saw this most extremely during COVID, and I usually hate "both side-ing" things, but I did see this pretty extremely on both sides. "MASKS DON'T WORK!!", "YES THEY DO!!", "IT WAS A LAB LEAK!!", "IT WAS ANIMALS FROM THE WET MARKET!!", "KIDS ARE FINE!!", "KIDS ARE AT SERIOUS RISK!!". It's like at some point I just wanted to scream "Maybe we just don't know yet."
I get sick to my stomach reading that thread. It was close to the last straw for me with regards to leaving this community completely, or at least trying to fight my HN habit.
I get a lot out of the things shared here and the discourse, but sometimes we get those threads and I just can't believe so many otherwise smart, intelligent people would believe and say such horrible things.
I remember rolling my eyes alot while reading the comments in that thread. I would expect many of those people will double down rather than offer any mea culpa.
It’s interesting. The initial post that mentioned that Rob Lee was murdered got mass flagged and stayed at the bottom of the page. There’s discussion about his murder and crime in general, but the top comment is asking people not to be political and to post their memories of Rob Lee.
The only submission about Rob Lee’s death that stayed at the top of the page was one that didn’t mention that he was murdered in the headline, and where dang came in and told everyone to keep politics out of it and avoid flamewar stuff.
People said it was reasonable that people mass flagged any submission that mentioned the murder in its headline, because it was flamewar stuff.
But now we have this submission. I looked through all of the top comments, and they’re _all_ using this to talk about the larger “is San Francisco safe?” debate. About half of them are specifically complaining about other people’s views, including complaining about other Hacker News comments.
That's absolutely not what happened. This, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899, was the original post that got a lot of traction about Bob Lee's death. I was one of the people who flagged it pretty early on, not because I thought it wasn't newsworthy, but because it was one of the biggest collection of dumpster fire comments I've ever seen on HN - hardly anyone was interested in anything but spouting their own preconceived notions, particularly since at that point very few details were actually known about the crime.
But as you can see from that link and the vote counts, it was definitely (pretty quickly) unflagged, and then you can see in the top comments that dang just split the threads into 2 separate posts, one for rememberances of Bob Lee and the other one remained for political discussion.
I agree with you that we shouldn't be using anecdotal evidence to drive outrage and public policy. There are a whole host of biases and errors that pop up when using anecdotal evidence as you pointed out.
The flip side is that people have zero interest in statistics-based discussions. Even supposedly data-driven engineers. If you find that property-crime has increased by X%, of which Y% can be attributed to specific public policy decisions, you will get zero traction if you frame this as a data-driven discussion. People grok stories. They may somewhat understand statistics and numbers, but they don't grok it. Hence why almost all discussions revolve around anecdotes with some statistics provided as supporting evidence.
Ironically, for-profit companies are far better at having data-driven discussions and decisions. I have little hope that this will ever be the case in public discourse.
Also we are all so proud of being rational and data driven while ignoring the actual murder rate in SF, which is well below average in America. Now you can say that it's high relative to the rest of the world but most people here want to shit on SF relative to the USA too.
As soon as I saw the reported murder I figured it was a business partner who felt scorned, but then HN narrative continued for a full week about the lack of safety in SF. While things might be bad, random murders by strangers are still a rarity compared to targeted killings.
I find it strange that nobody is mentioning the Hindenburg Research report against Square that came out a week before the stabbing, and the fact that there’s likely a fraud investigation underway.
>I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"?
From the looks of your replies, more than a few are back to comment here to say "Actually I am still right."
Which, frankly, seems to me more evidence I should just not bother to browse threads about this kind of inflammatory subject. Even on HN where discussion quality tends to be better, there's plenty of people who just show up to shout, and not listen.
When i heard about it at first i thought maybe it had something to do with MobileCoin… maybe someone lost a lot of money or was afraid to lose market share.
Then when I commented I was really trying to figure out the mechanics of how it went down if it really were a robbery.
>hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city,
You’re doing the same thing in this thread, where the very article we are discussing shows that murders have been on the rise in the past 5 years.
Your comment was good, then you used the edit to spew your confirmation bias.
There was a woman in Portland I believe who poisoned her husband and made it look like a drug tampering serial killer situation.
They caught her because they found traces of fish tank algaecide in the pill bottles. She reused the same mortar and pestle to do both. The local fish supply store had records of her buying the same algaecide.
It's all relative. The safest parts of the U.S. still feel like too much for me. And I'm sure where I grew up in Canada would seem like a post-apocalyptic hellscape to some others around the world.
What was more incredible was being accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I had commented in the SF subreddit and on twitter that I personally didn’t think it was random.
SF still has above average violent crime[1]. Its top 7 in terms of overall crime, so being "just" above average for violent crime seems not so bad in comparison. But the objective reality is that BOTH property crime and violent crime is worse in SF than in most other cities.
Violent crime is rare everywhere, for some definition of rare. I can walk through the most dangerous part of Chicago tonight and I will almost certainly survive. However, if I do that every night for my entire life, the cumulative risk will be unacceptably high.
It would be wrong to insist Chicago doesn't have a problem with violence just because I have much better than Vegas odds of not dying today. SF has different parameter inputs than Chicago, but my point applies.
> of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami
Many of us mentioned this (I did in my comment), which is why we are so surprised about this murder. Now it makes more sense, although still tragic. We still get to gripe about property crime, which has been higher than average for awhile now and only seems to be getting worse.
Yeah the exact same thing happens with Portland every time it pops up on here. The HN audience by and large irrationally hates progressive policies and cities with them. It’s weird watching people here parrot the opinions of the corporate overlords.
Any topic on HN which is tangentially related to the Culture Wars (progressive cities/DAs among them) typically has several comments bashing the "woke".
I don't think this is a great representation of what's going on.
There are many legitimate problems in Portland. If you go on any online discussion you'll see residents showcasing them. Those threads get barraged by liberals and conservatives that don't live here either defending or attacking the issue at hand. None of this is helpful.
I wish you could hear the frustration in my voice. Frustration at the Progressive Party for picking ideology over the health of the city, frustration at the right for turning our local issues into national showcases, frustration with the people in the comments who think commenting on the goings on of a city they don't live in is anything but a bad faith take.
I am tired. I want Progressives and Republicans gone, and from what I can see I'm part of a growing group in this city. We'll solve our own problems in due time, extremists can get lost.
The Chicago one gets me. I am not in SF often but we have taken 3-day weekend trips to Chicago since my children were 3. Multiple times walking around downtown, enjoying Navy Pier, even a couple of cases where we were walking to our hotel probably later than we should have after the fireworks.
Not once did we ever feel unsafe in the 10 years we have made trips out there. But read the news and you'll think it was a lawless warzone.
I don't exactly blame people, who live in SF and have seen crime get worse, from latching onto a high profile murder as more evidence of crime out of control.
So this particular murder was a personal thing, ok.
But that doesnt change the fact crime has gotten worse in SF.
You're doing the same thing now. We don't even know if this is actually the perpetrator yet, and even if it is it doesn't matter. Anything bad (or good) that was written about SF can still be true.
> I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"?
Sure, people were wrong in their assumption that the murder was random. At least that's how it looks now. We haven't heard the suspects side, but....
But wrong that SF has become a dangerous and mismanaged city? Murder isn't the only violent crime and a lot of crime goes unreported. People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience". The fact that everyone assumed that Bob Lee was murdered randomly says something about the state of the city.
SF has a lot of issues and it has a lot of crime and other issues. It has been mismanaged for years now and things need to change.
People see homelessness and open drug use and petty property crime, filter it through their ideological lens, and amplify that into feeling that they are themselves somehow less safe. You can assert that that is rational, but it's as connected to reality as someone feeling afraid when e.g. a black person is walking behind them.
Saying stuff like "a lot of [violent] crime goes unreported" is straight up fanciful thinking, and leads one to make claims that aren't falsifiable. People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.
I have personally witnessed a few assaults in NYC that I am sure went unreported. I don't think it's the same kind of thing you're thinking of: these are things like fights that happen in bars, which are usually handled without police involvement, not random attacks on the street. And claims about unreported crime are falsifiable - see studies like this one https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
> People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.
One reason this explanation falls flat is that reported and recorded property crimes have risen more. If the city were exceptionally underreporting crimes compared to the past or other cities, you'd see those disappear from the statistics more than e.g. homicides; it's much easier to ignore a stolen phone than it is a dead body.
Could that not be that you need to report/record a crime for insurance purposes?
There might be a good reason people would report some crimes over others for reasons over and above simply for the sake of reporting them/having them solved.
In that comment I didn’t even get to the new stories about a brick being thrown, creeps following her, or last night’s gun falling out of the pants of a meth head at the bus stop. I would feel unsafe as well, not like I’m immune to bullets.
Minimizing this stuff just because it was mentioned in the wrong thread is ignoring real problems. Two things can be true at once.
> Rapes, robberies and assaults are still well below pre-pandemic levels, and because violent crime is generally less likely to go unreported than property crimes, it would not be inaccurate to say that general levels of violent crime are lower now than they were a few years ago.
That IS a less safe space. What are you actually talking about? An area with homeless, open drug use, and petty property crime is 100% a more dangerous area. No one would allow their children to go walking through an area like.
Seriously what sort of weird ideological rant are you on in this thread? You have some really bizarre thinking regarding this issue.
People vote based on how they feel, so I'd say it is government's responsibility.
Especially since feeling safe is not the only thing government gets evaluated on. I don't feel threatened by feces on the street, and yet I'd want government to fix that too.
>People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience". The fact that everyone assumed that Bob Lee was murdered randomly says something about the state of the city.
It definitely says something about the people that made that assumption. But this is just tautologic - it's unsafe because I feel unsafe, and I feel unsafe because it is unsafe. As a NY'er, this seems like a ton of whining by people that never actually encountered any actual threatening, so they make these whiny, dramatic, histrionic arguments about how the city is "beyond" saving, using all sorts of overhyped rhetoric.
You must think you’re quite clever with that slight of hand comparing homicides in SF with other cities when people are talking about crime in general.
I'm not a Maoist so I can admit when I was wrong. Looks like it was a personal beef.
But that in no way changes the point that SF is a toxic environment. Here's the SF fire commissioner being brained by a violent homeless man this past week...
That goes both ways. I wonder if you would come back to this comment when one of your held beliefs are disproven. I won’t derail this thread into what it might be, but I won’t hold my breath…
> San Francisco recorded 56 homicides each in 2022 and 2021, up over 36% from 2019, when there were 41 homicides, according to police department data. Despite the increase, the number of homicides in San Francisco is well below that of other cities of a similar size, data from the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association shows.
> Indianapolis, for example, witnessed 271 homicides in 2021 and 226 in 2022. Jacksonville, Florida, meanwhile, saw 129 homicides in 2021 and 154 in 2022, while 204 homicides took place in Columbus, Ohio, in 2021 and 140 in 2022.
> Violent crimes in San Francisco, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, reached a high in 2013 with 7,164 violent crimes, according to California Department of Justice data. But they have tapered off significantly in the past couple of years. San Francisco now falls in the lower middle of the pack when compared with several cities of a similar population, according to data from the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association.
San Francisco is just "average", and possibly "below average", for violent crime. Claiming it is one of the most violent cities in the country is just hysterics with no basis in reality.
I was surprised to see in the article that SF has only had 12 murders so far this year. My city is less than 1/3 the size and has 14 murders so far, and it doesn’t feel like a lawless hell hole to me. Every murder is tragic, but almost all of them involve parties known to each other.
Thanks for the numbers. On the street except for murder cops won’t even take your report anymore. The numbers reflect nothing in SF and residents know it.
>The numbers reflect nothing in SF and residents know it.
Former, recent resident with a penchant for late-night dancing (read: frequently ended up in "seedy" areas in the middle of the night) chiming in. Never felt as though I was in danger while out and about, day or night, and never felt that SF was a more violent city than others.
Isn't it this way in almost every major urban US area? I was in St. Louis for a conference and got robbed, after I reported it to police and told them I had the current location of the suspects because they stole my phone and location services was still on, the police laughed at me and told me "what do you want us to do, go bust some doors down?", then instructed me to file a report but explained it might not be worth it to even bother doing so because there was almost a 0% chance of my stolen goods being returned.
Current resident. I walked 1 mile home late last night, through two neighborhoods that people call sketchy. The only thing that felt unsafe was the cars.
"On the street except for murder cops won’t even take your report anymore."
Completely false and you only have to look at the police crime dashboard to know that. I'm a resident and can say that the numbers track pretty closely with my experience here anyway.
I was just laughing about this position the other day: if the the stats confirm your position they’re accurate and can’t be ignored. If they’re not then the bookkeeping is wrong. A win/win situation!
Did you miss the fact that we had two entire elections to install a new reactionary pro-cop DA, specifically so that people who use this excuse to make things up about SF crime could can it?
> objectively one of the most violent cities in the country
The news article (and many comments in this thread) says the exact opposite:
> San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug-use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the police clearance rate for property crimes has long been minimal. But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low and is lower than that in most mid-to-large-sized cities.
Property crime is sky-high, sure. Violent crime is a totally different category. It is important not to mix them up.
2021 homicide rate across comparable cities:
St Louis 66.5
Detroit 47.9
Phila 34.8
Milwaukee 33.9
...
Austin 8.2
SF 6.9
...
NY 5.5
We can talk about other types of violent crime (maybe the other ones are higher, I haven't looked into them recently) but let's at least stick to the well-defined categories and since you said it's "objectively one of the most violent" then we should be able to back that up with stats in each category: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
That's exactly what it is. White collar upper middle class types are more exposed to it relatively (not necessarily absolutely) in SF than in other cities. Even if the actual odds of being victim of a violent crime are lower overall they're still higher per crime and people still feel more exposed because the market shares of the various things that make up the crime pie are very different in SF than in other cities.
In Chicago, Baltimore, all those other cities techies turn up their nose at for their crime rates you might get shot in a convenience store robbery, you might get knifed by a mugger but the overwhelming majority of the violence is drug dealers and users and distributors settling scores amongst themselves (because they can't use the courts to do it for them).
Contrast with SF where the overall amount (overall or per capita) of violent crime is lower but it is much, much more concentrated toward the randomly targeted crime affecting people not already involved in activity beyond the law types of creimes meaning that your odds of getting shot in a convenience store robbery or knifed by a mugger are higher in SF than a city of equivalent violent crime rates per capita that has a more normal looking crime pie chart.
Also the parent said "violent crime" not just homicides. In addition it is known that homicides among the homeless, of which SF is known to have many, are underreported.
In that case, try this[0] one that another HNer posted. It even allows you to sort by type of crime.
> In addition it is known that homicides among the homeless, of which SF is known to have many, are underreported.
Uhhh...Have you ever been around a decomposing corpse? They're not so easy to hide or dispose of, and the population you're talking about isn't likely to have the resources to do so.
As such, you might want to check the "source" of information you're relying on for that assertion. That said, I could be completely wrong and SF's homeless community has a bustling trade in disposing of bodies. But that seems pretty unlikely, don't you think?
Your comment indicates you do not understand the mental state of many homeless people. I have a good friend, who has beaten by a homeless man in Los Angeles. None of his wallet, phone, or cash was taken. It was not a robbery. It was a senseless beating.
It’s not extreme when you compare it to most other Western cities. If you want to get into undeveloped nations and dilapidated ghost cities, you’re just entering a different arena.
The endless tent encampments, open drug use, human feces on the street, glass/needles/trash everywhere, and rampant vehicle theft make the place unbearable. It is a shithole.
Western cities like Portland, LA, Eugene, or Seattle? Or is that just west coast and you also mean to include Baltimore, Detroit or St Louis? Many of those are worst. Or I could go to Miami or Austin where their states are trying to legislate me out of existence.
I don’t disagree things have gotten worse, but a wide variety of factors are contributing to this beyond politics. They’re also mainly occur in certain areas - I don’t come across all the things very often living in SF because I’m not in SoMA/civic center/mission where it’s all the most acute.
Not really, SF is a shithole for a wealthy North American city. And I say that as someone who grew up here and still loves this place.
Story time. We literally had squatters break into and occupy a house two doors down from us, on Sunday (Easter). I was gardening in the front yard and seven people came and went over the course of the day. The police came in the afternoon but missed them, and they came back that night. It took until Tuesday to get them out and lock down the building so they couldn't get back in. A similar incident happened across the street a few months ago, the squatters even changed the lock on the front door.
I've lived here nearly half a century and I've never seen anything like this. Oh, also, last month, a guy came through and busted into several cars one morning. He got five or six of us.
- - - -
The thing is, SF has always been a crazy shitty town. It's also beautiful and fun, but this is the town that grew from the Gold Rush. It was built by 49ers and the folks who sold them shovels and booze and women. It's always been crazy here.
So when people point to SF as the paragon of Left-wing politics, they are ignoring that it's not really a functional city and never has been. The port is in the East Bay where the train tracks run, eh? No trains on the Golden Gate Bridge, eh? There's no economic center here (except the artifical banking nexus, but that doesn't need to stay here, SV bank was in SV.) And the weather never gets better. The entire rest of the state has better weather. The people who think SF has nice weather typically stay in one of the tiny microclimates that avoid the worst of the wind and fog.
Seriously, go look at the trees in Mission Rock. They are all at 45 degree angles because the damn wind never stops. They should have put wind turbines on the roofs of those nifty new condos (the ones with the sidewalks breaking away from the buildings.)
Oh man, I could go on and on about this town.
All I'm really getting at is that, if you know the history of San Francisco, you know that it's not really a left-wing exemplar, it's just a nuthouse, and always has been since the USA kicked out the Spanish. (What the Spanish did is the stuff of nightmares. Before that it was the Ohlone people here, and I don't know what they were like. There are still a few Ohlone people around but everybody is real careful not to mention them except in the past tense because it breaks the illusion of inclusive progressive politics. We still want to e.g. build apartment buildings on their old cemeteries and such.)
Because the dataset is incomplete if even a single city doesn't opt into sharing data, or only provides a portion of the real data.
From the FBI itself:
> Pitfalls of Ranking
> UCR data are sometimes used to compile rankings of individual jurisdictions and institutions of
higher learning. These incomplete analyses have often created misleading perceptions which
adversely affect geographic entities and their residents. For this reason, the FBI has a long-‐
standing policy against ranking participating law enforcement agencies on the basis of crime
data alone. Despite repeated warnings against these practices, some data users continue to
challenge and misunderstand this position.
That's the point: there is no dataset that will allow you to reliably rank every "major city" by crime stats because every city reports crime differently and no crime dataset also accounts for factors which may affect those statistics (eg law enforcement misreporting crimes for political reasons).
How do you even define a city in this case? You say those are normalized crime stats per 1k residents - how big are the metro areas? Are there any cities that also count a portion of their suburbs as part of the city? Does doing so reduce per-capita crime stats? etc...
My suggestion would be to thoroughly vet your sources before posting their conclusions as fact.
No I didn't. I've been working with UCR data for 10+ years and I recognize it in the wild. Furthermore, my points still stands regardless of the source: "there is no dataset that will allow you to reliably rank every 'major city' by crime stats because every city reports crime differently and no crime dataset also accounts for factors which may affect those statistics."
If you know where their source data comes from and why its so accurate, feel free to educate me. Their own site says this:
> Q. Why rank cities on safety even though the FBI cautions against it?
> A. This report and/or our data cannot and should not be used as a measure of the effectiveness of law enforcement due to the myriad factors that can contribute to crime in a community.
This is suprising to me as non-American because Detroit reads to me "like gang-infested murdercity" and I would have expected San Francisco to do significantly better in crime numbers...
Are the numbers misleading or IS criminality in San Francisco comparable to Detroit?
The numbers are misleading because they're based on voluntary reporting from law enforcement agencies to the FBI's UCR program. The FBI has this to say:
Data users should not rank locales because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place. UCR statistics include only jurisdictional population figures along with reported crime, clearance, or arrest data. Rankings ignore the uniqueness of each locale. Some factors that are known to affect the volume and type of crime occurring from place to place are:
• Population density and degree of urbanization.
• Variations in composition of the population, particularly youth concentration.
• Stability of the population with respect to residents; mobility, commuting patterns, and
transient factors.
• Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
• Modes of transportation and highway systems.
• Cultural factors and educational, recreational, and religious characteristics.
• Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.
• Climate.
• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
• Administrative and investigative emphases on law enforcement.
• Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial,
correctional, and probational).
On the link you provided (https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime) there's a "Source & Methodology" link which says "Raw data sources: 18,000 local law enforcement agencies in the U.S." and "Date(s) & Update Frequency: Reflects 2021 calendar year; released from FBI in Oct. 2022"
The FBI puts out one main source of crime stats - UCR. On the UCR site that I linked to: "The UCR Program includes data from more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies." Those numbers aren't a coincidence.
UCR is the main data product that people use for (usually incorrect) analysis. The FBI itself says that the data is incomplete to the point that it should not be used as a way to determine the safety of a location.
They even discuss it in detail:
"What makes NeighborhoodScout® Crime Data uniquely accurate?
Most city neighborhood crime data are incomplete and inaccurate because crimes are reported by individual law enforcement agencies, rather than by city or town, and many cities – even small ones – have more than one agency responsible for law enforcement (municipal, university, county, transit, etc.). Even FBI data are reported by agency not by city or town, providing an incomplete assessment of city-wide crime counts. It is an agency-centric rather than locality-centric reporting method. If you use FBI data, you only get city-wide general counts, and only from one agency in the city, so it is generally incomplete for the city overall, as well as not specific to a neighborhood or address."
And further:
Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
The results are fine resolution, highly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.
Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively.
In some cases a city agency is in charge of law enforcement, while in other areas it’s a county. In many cases it is more than one agency for a geographic area. Since the geography varies, it’s difficult to compare the scores among jurisdictions, or to get a true and complete picture of crime risk. This is why we use a relational database to assess the true count of reported crimes in a locality.
Although most agencies report, not all do. This creates holes in the data. Our method allows us to accurately fill in the holes based on the crime experience of many like locales, and provide accurate crime data for anywhere in the U.S.
The quote you posted offers no actual information about how they purport to plug gaps in the data:
> And further: Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
> The results are fine resolution, highly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.
> Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively."
Can you explain to me what their methodology is? Because this is just marketing-speak and doesn't provide any facts about how or why their analysis is accurate.
---
Edit: from their own site!
> Q. Why rank cities on safety even though the FBI cautions against it?
> A. This report and/or our data cannot and should not be used as a measure of the effectiveness of law enforcement due to the myriad factors that can contribute to crime in a community.
You can generally assume most statistics posted within any comment on any site are misleading, and to use that cynicism to assess the "numbers".
Just how it is on the internet, most people who post the "numbers" are doing so for a very specific intention, and it's not at all to highlight the objectivity of them. You'll want to get the source research yourself and see what they say about it, and usually most papers tend to be far more nuanced than "thing bad" or "thing good".
The numbers might not be 100% accurate (as other commenter mentioned, there is no normalized dataset available) but they show an approximate scale.
It seems though that some Bay located HN readers disagree with both statistical and anecdotal evidence, which might be actually an example of sunken cost bias (it's not surprising considering the cost of property in SF / Bay Area)
If the claim of the former commissioner spraying people with bear mace is true then it is hardly a random attack but an escalation of violence after being attacked by a chemical weapon.
Yes, violence against homeless people is not only an under-reported phenomenon, its link to inciting further violence and crime is also under-reported. Thank you for highlighting it, if a little indirectly.
There is some relief in learning that a homeless person didn't commit this crime. However, the overall crime situation in SF, and other parts of the Bay, is still crazy... and I think that is the genesis of the 2600+ comment thread on the crime and homeless situation. SF crime IS A PROBLEM that is not being adequately addressed. So much so that folks assumed Bob was probably killed by a crazy drug addict or something. While wrong in this case, it was a reasonable first guess. And the conversation and flood of comment on the topic of crime flooded in from there.
The subject is violent crime. Don't cite a page that lumps property crimes in. Might want to look at some relevant data; https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-rate-bob-lee-sf-vio... has a handy chart halfway down, if you're not interested in reading.
I understand (believe me, it's in my bones) how hard it is not to lash back at people who resort to snark and swipes when they don't like what you're arguing on the internet—and how it's a thousand times harder when an impromptu mob is ganging up on you (or it feels like one is). But please don't cross the line yourself.
It's certainly true that people should never jump on a story to promote their own ideological concerns (e.g. San Francisco is pretty unsafe at night in many places), when the details of the story are unknown.
However, homicide stats don't tell the whole story about a city. There are many areas in SF where a resident would never go at night (or often during the day) because of the large numbers of drug addicts and homeless people. This means businesses in those areas have a hard time surviving. In terms of property crimes (in which violent assault is not involved) SF is leading the pack, at least in the top five. The lower rate of homicide is probably also linked to California's stricter gun laws compared to Texas and Florida, and also, many homicide victims are homeless, see LA:
The only plausible long-term solution is improved housing, more jobs, public health care, better education etc. This would require expenditure of public funds on a national scale (you can't fix this city by city, or state by state, because people migrate), i.e. increased taxes on the wealthy and a redistribution of military-industrial spending to domestic infrastructure of various sorts.
When I moved to SF in 1996, the murder count that year was 86. Last year it was 56. I haven't been back in a very long time, but I guarantee you it's a far safer city than it was back then. I lived on Market between 6th and 7th and had knives pulled on me, and watched a car get blown up across the street underneath Hollywood Billiards, which is long gone now - according to Google Maps, they're building new apartments there.
I loved the Tenderloin back then, even though it was terrifying. It was full of weirdos and loonies and junkies and poverty stricken artsy types like me, who had no power or desire in gentrification - we were just poor too. But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it. The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway.
Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go, and you still complain when they dare to pop up where you are. I hope all that authenticity and exposed brick in your offices and apartments are worth it.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. Your comment was great until the last paragraph, which swerved dramatically for the worse and basically drove the subthread off a cliff.
Comments demonizing other people and/or other groups of people are the scourge of internet forums. If you make it "y'all", that's worse yet, as now the demonized group gets to select itself and feel personally attacked.
I can't help but wonder why it's prudent to sweep in for a comment like that, but not any of the comments that have been associating homelessness with murder rates on an article apparently about a dispute between two tech workers. It's almost like the guidelines are catered not towards high-quality discussion so much as an aesthetic of high-quality discussion by protecting the emotions of a specific class of people who would get offended by that comment. Or should I be flagging comments that euphemistically mention the "homeless problem"?
We're not protecting any "specific class of people". Anyone with an insight to offer about homelessness, or any other question under discussion, is welcome to do it. We just ask people not to rage at and/or demonize each other, because that's the way that internet forums destroy themselves. Scorched earth isn't interesting to anybody: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
People often think that if we moderate comment X, we must care less about or even be endorsing comment Y, but that's not the case. We just see a more-or-less random sample of the comments. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough with my criticism: You are unambiguously making a value judgement that the feelings of people who get offended by comments like "Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go" are more important than the homeless who are being baselessly accused of being murderers. I don't think you honestly expect me to believe this discrepancy is simply because you "see a more-or-less random sample of the comments", but if that is the case, simply search for "homeless" in the relevant discussions and have at it -- if you still can't see the problem, then read the results again replacing "homeless" with "y'all" or "people like you" and see if you feel the same way about whether they could use commenting on. The only way you can possibly justify the way the guidelines has been handled is if it operates on the idea that people who are less represented here, such as the homeless, don't deserve the same courtesy.
I make no such judgement. I moderated plenty of those comments when I saw people breaking HN's rules, just as I moderated yours when I saw you breaking HN's rules. The assumption that I must be secretly siding against your view is wrong, let alone the implication that my values must be twisted and inhumane because I'm doing my job this way.
People always feel like the mods must be against them (and are depraved to boot) when their comments get moderated. It's a routine reaction and it's completely illusory. Comments that express this reaction are all pretty similar, no doubt because they have the same mechanism underlying them.
It's more or less random which comments we "choose to take a stand over". If we see people breaking the rules, we ask them not to. There's no implication of a total ordering, or any hierarchy of abuse.
The idea that if comment X says one thing and Y says another and we reply to X but not Y, that means we're endorsing "violent police responses to the homeless", is... not valid. It's not possible for us to see everything, even in the same thread, let alone all threads.
If you see particularly egregious comments that haven't been moderated, you're welcome to point them out to us and we can take a look. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
I never claimed or implied that you are endorsing anything. Tolerating and endorsing are different things.
The thread was full of people blaming the homeless for the murder before any facts were known and calling for a response. Not one or two comments, a thread full of them.
Ok. I thought you were implying some sort of bias or incorrect priority in how we moderated that thread, and didn't think that was true or fair. I posted dozens of moderation comments there, and did plenty of scolding of the comments you're objecting to. In fact I spent my entire day doing that and related things; it wasn't possible to do more.
If that wasn't what you were saying, I'm sorry for misinterpreting you!
"Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go"
1.) I grew up in the rural South, and was literally harassed for most of my career for saying "y'all" and "folks" but glad to see it's trendy to speak that way amongst the exact kind of people who used to assume I was ignorant for speaking that way.
2.) Your statement could just as easily be, on a different day: "Y'all abandoned the city for the suburbs and deprived the city of a tax base to help the poor."
Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Same applies to livability: If you demand quality of life crimes be dealt with to make a city cleaner, you are guilty of not "embracing where we were and not trying to change it".
Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion and nostalgia without thinking about the fact that there are low income children who have to grow up in these places. Maybe parents aren't thrilled with having their 10 year olds learn the valuable life lessons of "how to not get knifed by a junkie in an alleyway".
Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs. I've personally (in DC) been mugged at gunpoint (they threw me onto the pavement in the process) and had a random guy jump out of his car to assault me because I walked in front of his car in heavy traffic (all cars stopped) to cross a street, and he viewed it as "disrespecting him".
Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor. Beliefs like that are luxuries for certain kinds of people who are insulated from the worst of it, one way or another. It's easy for a childless bohemian to have no problem with needles in parks, but for those of us raising future citizens, it's not fun.
One major aspect I want to touch on that bother me in the perspective you criticize.
Poverty and crime are not married.
My wife and I both grew up poor and working class. Living in trailers are in our life stories. You can be dog poor and still not be a junkie, still not mug others, still not assault people. This was understood widely in our upbringing and those we dealt with. People _did_ misbehave, but it was not "just what happens".
Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view. People don't have to do that. That is their choice. Improvement is possible.
> Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view.
Very disagree. It is not immoral or prejudicial to note the simple reality that, in aggregate, poverty and crime are correlated[0], and in part because poverty creates conditions where crime is more likely[1].
That doesn't mean that any particular person is doomed to crime because they're poor, or can't improve. Of course they can, and of course nobody should assume that a particular person is a criminal based on membership in a socioeconomic class (or any other class).
But it's just true that poverty and crime are correlated. There are confounding factors (police are more likely to arrest a poor person, and more likely to merely warn a rich person), but nothing suggests that crime is merely equally prevalent among poor and non-poor populations.
I applaud the compassion, and I agree that individuals bear the moral weight of doing the right thing, but let's not deny facts in service of those principles.
The plural of anecdote is not data. Your story is nice, but the reality is poverty is heavily correlated with crime. And social nets address both at once.
letting poor people suffer because some poor people can improve their station in life through luck, hard work and a number of other extrenous factors is unethical.
this is really not true. Poverty is correlated with crime, but the magnitude of this correlation is quite small. Portugal is very safe and very poor compared to most of the US
what does it mean "not poor internally"? I've been to Portugal, compared to US it's just poor. Source for "spend less % on housing, food" ? very much doubt this. Poor in the US get food stamps, etc.
It means you do not have homeless camps in hollywood boulevard next to million dollar penthouses. The income inequality is smaller therefore the variance in income levels is smaller and therefore all prices are down.
Let me give you an example.
Country A is rich. The poorest person has 10$ the richest has 100000$
Country B is poor the poorest person has 1$ the richest person has 5$.
In both country Nestle sells water bottles, they use a formula to maximise profit based on average earnings. On country A a water bottle is 20$ in country B is 0.2$.
Despite the proportional poverty, a poor person in country B can buy 5 water bottles while a poor person on country A can buy 0.
On the most expensive city in Portugal and the only thing cheaper in SF is gasoline, something most people in portugal don't use as much as they walk everywhere.
> Poor in the US get food stamps
Getting vouchers for milk and beans is not helping people. Portugal for example does not have millions of people in jail for minor drug offenses. Portugal does not have medical bankruptcy. Portugal does not have homeless camps in every mayor city.
Also food banks are common everywhere, the only difference is they are usually much broaders and healthier than food stamps and come on top of unemplyment payments, health benefits, and council housing.
> I've been to Portugal
I was born in Spain a few decades ago, I am gonna take my 18 years there over your weekend abroad.
> It's easy for a childless bohemian to have no problem with needles in parks, but for those of us raising future citizens, it's not fun.
> Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion
> Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs.
C'mon man. You don't know the person you are responding to and included multiple personal attacks in your response. There's a way to make your argument without making the person you are responding to your own personal hate-object.
I also grew up in the south. Interestingly, I always got more harassment for that sort of phrasing from other southerners. Most folks just don't give a shit, oddly. And those that do are often holding themselves back by trying to hold down others.
Sadly, I think there is enough evidence that the game plan is to build classes of people that are constantly holding each other down. That is literally the point. :(
> Your statement could just as easily be, on a different day: "Y'all abandoned the city for the suburbs and deprived the city of a tax base to help the poor."
That's a different situation from this one, so, sure, if that's something that happened and then you're complaining about the place you don't live anymore, sure, that's also a statement that could be made.
> Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't
Not surprisingly, those aren't the only two options.
> Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor
I think you're confused if you think the GP's comment "It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway" was nostalgic for the getting knifed part.
white flight = moving out of city because of fear, cost, crappy schools, etc. is flight. A white person moving to the boondocks because they want to homestead or live off grid is not "flight".
gentrifier = higher income person/family moving into a city or neighborhood, raising the housing costs by doing so, causing the long time residents to leave because of said costs and changing the culture of said area because the old families don't live there anymore.
White flight is a term used as slant, it isn’t some nuanced term for actually determining the different intentions of movers. If enough white people move for whatever reason then there’ll be someone waiting to paint it as racism.
Schelling’s segregation model comes to mind in these moments but I never see that mentioned, strangely. Oh, the inconvenience of maths that explains things better than divisive and ignorant rhetoric!
> The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy
I worked in the Warfield building from 2014 to 2017. It wasn't deep in the TL, but it still numbed me to things. Crossing police tape to get into the office? NBD. Coworkers getting assaulted? Happens every few months.
> Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go
If you said something like this about The Mission, I'd agree, but the TL wasn't even close to gentrifying. People tried to make it happen, but it never got to a point where people wanted to be there, and that was only at its periphery.
For decades, San Francisco hasn't been building enough new units to house even just the children of natives[1], to say nothing of those like you and I who were born elsewhere and dreamed of moving here.
The people who "gave the poorest folks nowhere to go" were the ones who voted to prohibit the construction of anything but single-family houses[2] in 76% of the city[3].
> Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go, and you still complain when they dare to pop up where you are.
What leads you to conflate poverty with criminal activity, and proceed to victim-blame those who dare complain about criminal activity?
Equating poor people with criminals is indeed quite discriminatory. It’s ironic to see that used in a statement from someone who believes themselves to be taking the moral high ground.
The equation he made isn't wrong, but it contradicts the fact that OP is criticizing people who agree with what they said themselves.
Data clearly shows a correlation between crime levels and average income in an area. Are we not mostly engineers used to working with data here? In fact, needing to "survive" is a common excuse used to justify the crimes committed in impoverished areas.
Note that I said correlation, not causation. If someone has data that says otherwise, please provide it because I would be genuinely intrigued.
> Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go
I think part of this is not realizing that a lot of the locals (the previous colonizers) are part of the problem. I can guarantee that the colonizers would love for more housing to be built in SF because they don't want to pay $2m for a 2bd townhouse either.
A huge portion of the SF "colonizer" demographic can't even fucking vote. They're all on visas.
People love to invent boogiemen where they dehumaize groups of people as uncaring caricatures. It's much easier than confronting the hard problems and feels good.
Your comment borders on defending violent crime and murder. As if stabbings are part of San Francisco's quirky, artsy past, and the people that live here should think of violent crime as character-building.
“ Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go, and you still complain when they dare to pop up where you are.”
Nope. One of the wealthiest cities in the world fails to look after its inhabitants. A failure of government
People who moved to SF in 96 like GP are much more politically influential than the "colonizers" who arrived more recently. And yes, someone who arrived in the late 90s calling other people "colonizers" is hilarious.
I think you're using the term "inhabitants" loosely here. The US doesn't have much of a social safety net, which means that any city that attempts to build one may suddenly find that "its inhabitants" include the 330 million people living in other parts of the country who need help. Or who would just like some money and an opportunity to do meth and fentanyl and shoplift and commit property crime in a place with very little law enforcement. I personally would include that in the definition of "needing help." Any version of "help" that will help in SF will have to be coercive, which is another thing SF's political culture is having tremendous difficulty accepting.
But really, if you took Stockholm out of Sweden and plunked it down into the middle of the US, how long do you think the social safety net would last before it went bankrupt? And this is assuming you retain the european willingness to be coercive about mandatory rehab and confinement (something US based progressives are reluctant to note is a feature of the european social safety programs they otherwise praise).
>Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go, and you still complain when they dare to pop up where you are. I hope all that authenticity and exposed brick in your offices and apartments are worth it.
I'm curious who you think you're referring to when you make a statement like this. (Hint: You're probably wrong).
There is a difference in who is getting attacked these days vs past. In the past, the crime was more amongst the people taking part in obviously dangerous things.
Now it feels more like it can happen to anyone. I spent a few years in SF as a child 89-92. Have visited several times a year, every year, since 1992. It's definitely the most run down, dirty, and unpleasant it has ever been IMO. I have luckily never had anything stolen, but I for sure see more broken glass and more broken car windows too.
I once was walking in downtown with a lady I was dating and a guy who looked homeless and was obviously very high snuck up on me and wrapped his arm around mine and started talking to me. I did not get scared, I just talked to him like he was my best friend. He said, your girlfriend is really pretty, and I said, "Yes, she is is!" and I asked whether he was having a nice day and wasn't the weather great and made small talk about various things. He released his grip on me eventually and walked away and my date didn't even realize, until I told her what happened later that there was any sort of danger. Street people are so used to people being utterly horrified of them that if you treat them like they are a normal human being, they'll be less likely to want to act violent toward you.
I don't want to be contrarian for the sake of it, but the fact that by luck the guy physically stalking you and immobilizing you happened to back down isn't really convincing me of the safety of SF or alleys.
If being street smart means "try to stay calm when possibly about to be stabbed and killed", I think I'll skip that lecture. I'd prefer if street smarts included how not to let a drugged up guy not get behind you and near you. And how to get out of a bear hug by a drugged up guy. Because "hoping he is nice" doesn't sound like a plan to me.
Being calm and always treating people as humans give you a super power of being able to defuse situations and achieve tactical supremacy. Anger meets anger. True in actually scary east coast cities and true in the noble if slightly flawed gem of San Francisco.
But the article here is how this was some conflict between friends, so the city doesn’t really matter. All the fearful people should be reassured by this outcome. Manage your domestic life well for good safety outcomes.
If you've already got a drugged up person with their arms around you, I don't think "kind words" will help you unless you got lucky and met a kind stranger of ecstacy. By pure luck this worked. Most times, when you have a druggy grabbing you from the back, it won't go so nicely IMO.
The way things work in "ghetto logic" is a guy from the ghetto will kill you for "disrespecting." So instead you act friendly, unafraid, and respectful and that's good enough for them to want to go mug someone else.
If you want to get a good feel for San Francisco ghetto logic, or ghetto logic in general, I recommend the excellent, but hard to get a hold of documentary, "Straight Outta Hunter's Point" (2003).
Your approach may have been more cautious but out of principle, I probably would have asked him to release his grip, followed by shoving him away if necessary. Normalizing those kinds of intimidation tactics is not in the interest of anyone. If more individuals were to stand up for themselves, it's likely that the person in question would reconsider employing such tactics.
Jesus Christ, why would I want to have to do this to stay safe. Consider my approach: moving to a suburb where people like that don't come, and if they do, are harassed by police until they leave.
I've never felt unsafe in an alleyway in sf. but probably the same as any other city - don't be a dumbass, avoid the alleyways in shady parts of the city, esp at night.
"The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway."
I 100% agree. I lived 5 blocks uphill from the Tenderloin and would walk though the loin to go to Bourbon & Branch or while coming back from the theater late at night. I learned all three of those lessons as well. It was rare that I was scared but I was always hyper alert.
How safe you are mostly depends on your gender, size and frankly race. If you are a tall male your experience is simply not comparable to someone that is less able to fend off a physical confrontation.
Its great nothing traumatic happened to you, but I’ve seen how much more of a target for harassment some of my friends are and I don’t blame them for being afraid.
Sounds like someone is trying to put themselves in a category and everyone else in another. You were part of a wave of colonizers, taking spaces from poorer people. You can't hide behind being artsy.. those tend to be the biggest colonizers
I lived in the Tenderloin for a bit after high school.
First and foremost, avoid alleyways, avoid junkies. It seems like simple advice and it is.
What I learned as a nerdy white kid living in TL was that there is a largely non-verbal communication system, a kind of thieves' cant (although, as I mentioned, it's largely non-verbal, almost like a sign language but with subtle facial expressions and body postures rather than specific signs. (Actual gangs do use specific hand signs to recognize each other.))
If you "know the score" you can just tell someone, e.g. "Hey, don't mug me." using this communication system and they will leave you alone. This happened to me. I was walking through the 'loin when a dude comes up off the wall and starts to fall in behind me. I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye, and I gave him the slightest shake of my head, "nah", and that was it. He fell back and posted up on the wall again, and it was over.
Just being aware of what's going on differentiates you from the clueless "mark". That's the main thing: you're part of the "in-group". You have heard of "woke"? This level of awareness of the nature of life on the street is part of what one is woke to, or not, eh? This cant would seem like telepathy to an unaware outsider.
So, I was able to tell my would-be mugger that, although I look and walk like a clueless tech nerd, I'm actually a resident who knows what's up, so please mug someone else? And, as neighbors do, he kindly preferred to look for someone wandering in from the nicer parts of downtown. A tech worker or tourist, eh?
(I saw those interactions too: Three "gentlemen" corner a fellow up against a wall, one of them displays an empty 40oz bottle, and an agreement of sorts quickly emerges to the effect that it would be much preferable for the victim to give up his wallet rather than receive the bottle to the head. They even gave him his wallet back afterwards. The whole thing took thirty seconds.)
There's also an element of stotting involved in what I'm saying, "an honest signal to predators that the stotting animal would be difficult to catch" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting ) Since I "know the score" I'm not going to panic or freeze up if this guy tries to rob me. There's a way to say with your body language, "I'm not going to be easy to rob."
If you don't have that naturally, for whatever reason, there is something called "adrenaline re-imprinting" self-defense courses. Without going into a long tangent about it, the essence is to re-program your adrenaline response to be coherent and defensive. If you haven't seen it, it's hard to imagine the intensity of a controlled adrenaline response. Even small, weak people can be extremely dangerous under the influence of adrenaline. Adrenaline is a hellofa drug. (I mean, in the course I took the instructor at one point has on one of those bear-proof suits, and it still seems like he's gonna get hurt. And the other people in my class were small women! They were destroying this guy.) Basically, the attacker would have to be literally psychotic to continue trying to attack someone in the throes of a controlled adrenaline response. Trying to approach someone in that state... it's like a force-field. There's something deep within you that is like "nope" when confronted with such a fury, and the effect gets stronger as you try to approach. It literally feels like a force-field. I have only had to use the training once, Thank God, and it stopped three guys in their tracks, literally. They were running up behind me, and I stopped and the adrenaline triggered and I spun around and did the thing (there's a posture and you shout "back off!") and they stopped in their tracks. I started a conversation with them and they were scared of me. As in I made a gesture and one of them jumped back a little. Anyway, the thing to search for is "adrenaline re-imprinting".
I like you Kragen, I hope it's not too weird to say that, so I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. Cheers!
I agreed with the parent's sentiments initially. But then I saw your comment before the edit, where you had called this "uneducated loser mentality." I'm sad that you edited it, because you're also right.
>I loved the Tenderloin back then, even though it was terrifying. It was full of weirdos and loonies and junkies and poverty stricken artsy types like me, who had no power or desire in gentrification - we were just poor too. But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it. The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway.
>But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it.
Poor is fine. It's a hard life, but it's a state of being. Even being artsy and a little crazy; that's great. The rest of it though...? Why romanticize this? It's bad. We shouldn't romanticize bad. Learn your lessons, but let's want something better.
>Poor is fine. It's a hard life, but it's a state of being. Even being artsy and a little crazy; that's great. The rest of it though...? Why romanticize this? It's bad. We shouldn't romanticize bad. Learn your lessons, but let's want something better.
The OC has either survivor ship bias or a bad memory. I've never lived in SF but I've lived in Portland and work adjacent to mental health professionals and the stories that they have of people being victimized in the camps and shanty towns are tragic.
For everyone who learned to 'not get stabbed' (whatever that means), there are people who DO get stabbed, or sexually assaulted, or robbed of the little money they had.
It is political choices, but it's not primarily on a city level, or a year-to-year level. The problems in San Francisco are generations in the making and often national in cause. You might read Loewen's "Sundown Towns" for a good look at a key factor to understanding American cities.
The "mentality" here is one appropriate for the person and the circumstance. As you say, his neighbors weren't aliens, they were people. Compassion and understanding were worthwhile efforts. And they remain so.
I did not say this mentality is not appropriate for one person. And I didn't say that compassion is not a worthwhile effort, so I am not sure what you are responding to.
this comment completely misses the point. I did not suggest San Francisco needs to be like Zurich. With respect, I think it is idiotic to suggest that the only option for the city to be as safe as Zurich is to become literally exactly like Zurich.
I also didn't say anything about flipping a city's character in a decade. Whether it takes 1 decade, 2, 3 or 4 -- there is no reason to accept the idea that city just has to be unsafe and nothing can be done about it
> there is no reason that SF has to be a lot less safe than Zurich.
Lack of Nazi gold to prop up a social net, which can later be defended tooth and nail with strong anti immigration policies while newer streams of illegal money such as mexican cartels are adquiered.
Maybe SF does not want money laundering for some of the worst people on the planet, to be its identity. But hey I guess the rolex watches and chocolate are pretty good.
It provided the original funding for many fo Zurich's public services.
> San Francisco is just as wealthy as Zurich
Kinda, but in a very different way. It requieres way more people, so it imports way more people. This makes the city more dynamic but also makes it harder to do sensible long term urban planning for example.
Also many services grew organically and are disfunctional such as the healthcare system in the US. That alone could fix many of SF problems, related to drug abuse (which is a healthcare problem not a crime one), medical related poverty and homelessness and mental illeness. With that alone, ignoring other solutions you would see a massive improvement in QoL in SF.
> The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.
I commented below but the IT consulting LLC in the bio is inactive (both in the division of corp website and online). Is that the only evidence here for the statement above?
You might want to start by reading the story before you try and dismantle it. A few paragraphs later:
Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.
Mods sometimes put "[redacted]" in a comment when we're taking out personally identifiable information, such as doxing or when a user asks us to edit out their name or email address after the fact.
In this case the GP contained a link to the suspect's linkedin page.
Edit: after thinking about it, I think we probably don't need to redact. If it were a random person caught up in the story it would be different, but once a person has been arrested for a crime they arguably become a public figure, even though innocent-until-proven-guilty is fortunately a thing.
It's a borderline case and I'm not sure, but anyway have restored the original comment for now.
Edit 2: plus the same link appears in the article itself.
Bob wasn’t gay. (EDIT: Never mind!) A man can have hooked up with guys and not be gay as much as a gay man can have hooked up with women and not be straight or bi.
More importantly, we don’t have any evidence they were lovers.
You probably should have led with the basis your belief: that would have made your original comment useful, even if you turned out to be confidently wrong (yet again).
> Yes, that is what you should have led with. What's the question?
No question to you. What I shared was personal and irrelevant. It's a bit snotty to turn a dead man into a football because you're upset my views on crypto.
No. You have a very persistent, easily fixable habit of being confidently wrong. I'm suggesting a way to fight that habit and make your comments useful, even for those cases where you turn out to be wrong. You can benefit from that advice, or you can double down. I know what the responsible option is.
> even for those cases where you turn out to be wrong
I’m not going to litigate a dead man’s personal life on a forum. But I’m not totally sold on that article. There are contemporaneous public quotes, too, where Bob identified as straight while acknowledging sleeping with men. It’s not an important issue, so I’m not going to fight it. But I will defend saying it, as well as my right to not say how I know.
On the crypto thread, I maintain that counterparty risk for e.g. LedgerX is significant in the event Bitcoin zeroes out. You disagree. So do a lot of people confidently placing leveraged bets there. This will almost certainly require court intervention, so it will be interesting to see.
Nevertheless, it was an interesting discussion from which I learned. I also appreciate this feedback, even though I disagree on speaking unequivocally or being required to breach one’s privacy to make a low-key point.
In the spirit of the HN guidelines, let's keep the crypto talk on the crypto thread.[1]
>But I will defend saying it, as well as my right to not say how I know.
Maybe I wasn't clear -- I just meant that you should have led with the stuff you were already comfortable saying, i.e. this part[2]:
>>>I never heard him use that label, and remember him pushing back on it,
and I asked that because it allows others to better gauge the credibility of the belief, rather than give the false impression that it's uncontroversial, widely accepted knowledge.
Heck, even saying that it was based on personal knowledge that you couldn't elaborate on would have been better.
You also just now gave other evidence that wasn't private, and would have also been helpful to know:
>There are contemporaneous public quotes, too, where Bob identified as straight while acknowledging sleeping with men.
None of that requires to you divulge anything private, but it does save you from being confidently wrong, and does provide useful context to the discussion.
I read through these threads, and I think if you're going to direct such pointed criticism to JumpCrisscross, you should reflect on your own comments as well - you repeatedly berate them for being incurious and confidently wrong, but I think you're largely misreading their tone and failing to ask for clarification on their views.
The guidelines you've referenced prescribe editing out swipes, but you make them repeatedly. Maybe you could transform those swipes into questions in the future. Eg, instead of saying, "yet again you're confidently wrong," you could say, "are you aware that FTX owned LedgerX and the creditors were unable to access client funds?"
There's such a thing as tact and respecting his widow and kids than to jump straight to scandalous speculations that besmirch his integrity, which are easy to make but in poor taste.
It is not “starting a flame war” to point out the masses of comments that rushed to draw racist and xenophobic conclusions about the killers identity before this information was revealed. If you as moderators of HN do not moderate such behaviour in the first place, then don’t be surprised to find that users might take it into their own hands.
You could have made that point without garish flamebait like "tech executives to be forcibly housed in a palace against their will". If you had done so instead, I would have had no reason to post a moderation reply.
We're not trying to combat anyone's substantive points. We're just trying to prevent garden-variety internet destructiveness. As you have a history of the latter, it would be good if you'd review the site guidelines and take them more to heart: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That's clearly not enough. Tech executives are doing too many drugs and it's leading to this kind of behavior, it's a cultural problem. They need fewer broken families and more time spent in church. And these rotten ones they need to be under constant watch by strict, controlling wardens.
Have you considered that the media has jumped to a framing of tech-on-tech crime at the behest of the powerful Big Homeless lobby? When was the last time you saw anyone but a homeless person sleeping in newspapers.
It’s interesting that you feel the need to say you don’t mean to politicize this, when the topic is already quite clearly political in nature, you’re simply addressing a point in an ongoing political discussion.
I believe the point is that peoples alternative theories of the issue being due to homelessness are the political ones. So by calling those people out, the commenter is opening themself up to political discussion.
I don't think there's anything political about saying "those people were wrong, I wonder if they'll change their views when presented with evidence that they were wrong". I also wonder if the people that jumped to conclusions will examine why they did that, but that's not a political statement.
Right, you don't think its political. But of the people who want to say SF is a crime-ridden hellhole, it will be political to them. So saying they are wrong invites them to argue with you about something they see as political.
It does seem like there is a constituency that wants to make this political, facts be damned. Calling that out will probably invite them to continue down their chosen path as you say, but it's still worth pointing out false narratives, even if the response is kind of annoying.
No, it's just accurate. A personal or business problem between two people is not political. What happened is a lot of people wanted this issue to be political, but they turned out to be wrong.
Those are the facts of the case, however what they were commenting on was the conversation that arose and has been ongoing since the event, which is out of line with the facts as we have come to know them. That conversation exists and is already political, there is no “making it political” at this point.
> I wonder if all the many commenters who had preemptively blamed homeless or poor people for this would change their mind in the light of this,
You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
> all tech executives to be forcibly housed in a palace against their will
I think sidetracking this with charged political comments and silly hypotheticals trivializes a serious issue.
>You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
It's true that the perfidious Other did not commit this particular crime even though I speculated immediately that They did. However, keep in mind that they are still a big problem! Me being wrong doesn't mean they're not!
You think you're being clever but you're just unwittingly being true. SF problems existed well before the case of Bob Lee and will persist - with the help of people like you - well after. Whether or not this particular case is part of them we'll soon see, but either way the problems are absolutely real and obvious to anyone not working very hard to not see them.
>You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
I don't doubt they have concerns. I doubt their ability to reason.
Using a single case as if it defines whether or not a massive systemic problem exists is not "ability to reason". It's ability to score gotchas on the internet. It's not the same thing.
Politicization is a ratchet. The conversation has already been politicized, I don't think there's any avoiding it.
Second, the discussion for all intents and purposes isn't even about Bob Lee, it's about crime in SF. That's why even when it turns out that Bob Lee wasn't killed by a homeless drug addict, the conversation is still about the homeless, drug addicts, petty crime, etc. I think it's illustrative of how wrong it is to use his death this way, even if he had actually been murdered by a vagrant, it would still be wrong.
I made that assumption, but kept my mouth shut, because it wasn't proven. And until there's released video evidence, an admission, or a guilty verdict, I'll do the same here. I think the initial people were too quick to blame druggies, and I think we'll just as well have people too quick to blame the people who blamed the druggies.
If you check out the “similar discussion” linked in a sibling comment to yours, you’ll find quite a lot of talking about that topic, if it interests you, for example the current top comment:
The assumptions were incorrect, but the problem is still there. Just removes one data point.
I walk around SoMa and it's a common occurence to walk past someone (loudly) muttering to themselves that they're going to kill or attack someone. It's not a "political" thing anymore, the city desperately, desperately needs help.
> I walk around SoMa and it's a common occurence to walk past someone (loudly) muttering to themselves that they're going to kill or attack someone.
I'm not saying that they all have a tic disorder or OCD, but utterances such as this can be linked to them. Tourette's is not all people saying sexually explicit things, sexually explicit utterances are only about 10% of Tourette's cases.
The point isn’t that homeless kill people, it’s that homeless and drug addicts create environments where people are more likely to be killed, by anyone.
Setting aside for a moment that this incident did not involve homeless people, we need to bring systems thinking to this problem, and ask what created the environment of homelessness to begin with.
Focusing only on the symptom here is similar to focusing on error logs and system crashes as if they are self contained phenomena and lamenting the impact they have on operations teams.
These issues are signs of upstream problems, and either there are poor coding practices somewhere in the org, or infrastructure that hasn’t been properly scaled/optimized (among a myriad of other possible causes).
This community in particular is well positioned to understand this broader mindset.
There have been only 12 murders this year in SF and none of them have been random. And you are literally commenting on an article where the murderer was apprehended within days. And SFPD has over 60% clearance rate on homicides. So your facts and conclusion are so hilariously wrong I would ashamed to hang out on these boards after this.
>The fact is if he wasn’t in San Francisco, he wouldn’t have been killed.
He knew the alleged assailant. There's nothing precluding them from getting into the same exact argument, with the same exact outcome, in any other locale.
> The fact is if he wasn’t in San Francisco, he wouldn’t have been killed.
Does this hypothesis apply only to Bob Lee or to anyone? Because if it applies to any human, then it’s so readily falsifiable that I’m surprised anyone would propose it.
You've been breaking the site guidelines by posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments repeatedly. We've warned you before not to do this. If you keep it up, we're going to have to ban you, so could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? We'd appreciate it.
This seems like a bit of a reach. "Move fast and break things" to me means take risks, don't get bogged down in process or do the same thing everyone else is doing. I don't see how you get from that to stabbing people. Your other quote is nice but it's a bit silly to apply it to a literal stabbing.
This is extremely unhelpful speculation, Bob Lee had not been a part of Square/Block for many years before the incident, if this was truly connected to the facilitation of money laundering and fraud, why target an ex-CTO of all people?
The report is about the use of user number fraud and illegal transactions to enable key early insiders to cash out and leave the company in decline.
That said, it looks like most of the accusations in the report are after he left the company.
i'm not sure what you call the situation where someone just says something with 0 basis but wants to sound like they are making some kind of critical point. it's akin to journalism where they ask a question in the title, and because it's a question, they're legally allowed to post it even if it's completely incorrect and has a 99% chance that the answer is "No"
Move fast and break things can also mean "undermine political systems, enable genocide, and damage the psychology of all generations that grow up in the digital era, for profit." So it's not as far of a reach to stabbing people as you want to believe.
Any two broad classifications will have some overlap. I don’t think you’ve demonstrated that this overlap is any bigger than with any other random classification (hair color, height, type of car they drive , etc.).
Really? I would have to at least assume that people who have committed murders have, on average, a higher propensity for risk taking than the average person.
I’d guess higher rates of mental illness, trauma, exposure to violence, overwhelming emotional responses, impulsiveness and a greater value on short-term instead of long-term goals.
I know plenty of business/sports risk takers that have no criminal history. I really don’t think it’s in the top 10 most important factors.
Nah, there's something to this: "move fast and break things" sure. Like, the tech bubble hasn't been kind to everyone. There is a sort of "bubble up and push everyone else" type of unrestrained competitiveness--sort of like (in analogy or simile, not hi-fi) the "sociopathic corporate culture" of the 80s that Bret Easton Ellis tries to skewer in American Psycho.
Capitalism and corporatism has always been violent, in many senses of the word (not just American, consider the various colonial "East India" companies). So while that's not new, there's something to the idea that particularly effusive emanations of corporate splendor or their nexes are coupled to physical violence, destruction and moral collapsism pragmas.
Look all I'm saying is that maybe instead of assuming the problems in the streets of SF are caused by degenerate hobos that maybe, just maybe, they're caused by degenerate tech bros.
Like who has the real power in this situation? the hobos or the techbros?
I don't expect hobos to be able to fix their situation, but I expect the people with money and resources to be able to. The fact that they don't shows that they don't want to.
Tech bros don't have political power, they're too busy working. California political power is held by rich retired people, children of upper class families, and landlords.
Do they have power comparable to TODCO, Dean Preston, the Sierra Club chapter that spends all their time getting laundromats declared historic buildings, etc?
No, I think precogs would have been required to prevent this case, which is why I used the words “this case”.
Also, I’m not following, people are fleeing SF because bandyaboot on hn thinks precogs are required to prevent “any level” of crime? I didn’t know I had that much clout! And my clout transcends temporal cause and effect!
In what way would precogs have absolutely been required here? This was out in the open in a public place. Ever considered that if there were ample police people wouldn’t be so brazen as to commit murder in public, better yet, police could have potentially prevented it from happening or assisted after the fact. The fact that many SF can’t even imagine another way this could have been prevented is exactly why they can’t fix it… and exactly why people are fleeing. Don’t delude yourself.
Either the killing was pre-planned in which case Momeni would have found or created an opportunity to carry it out regardless, or it was a fit of rage situation in which case you would need to have multiple police per city block at all times for there to be a reasonable likelihood that an officer could intervene in time to prevent incidents like this. Random crime you can police your way out of to some degree. This? No.
Of course this is all assuming the arrested individual did it.
You can't possibly be serious, right? So what is the point of police patrol? Adjusting police presence in different areas? Community initiatives? Prevention is definitively a key component of modern policing at least in every city and country I have lived in.
If that isn't the case in SF I'd say then that they have obviously failed on all levels at enforcing the law. Not to mention, punishment is definitely not the job of law enforcement.
Police departments have fought legal battles specifically to avoid having any duty to protect civilians or to prevent a crime in progress if they so choose.[0] I do agree with you that they (not just in SF, but across America broadly) have in fact obviously failed on all levels, though.
You don't see a link between a police force which actively rejects duty to protect and a police force that doesn't value prevention? It certainly seems to me that a police force which refuses to prevent crimes that are being carried out literally in front of them is one which places low value on prevention.
That isn’t what the law has determined though. The law has only determined that police can’t be sued or imprisoned for failing to assist. It can be my job to pick up trash, but that doesn’t make it my legal obligation even under threat to my own life.
What level of police ubiquity are you proposing, such that it would have prevented two people from two other cities from driving to SF in the middle of the night and starting a fatal altercation inside a car?
Yes and no. Law enforcement's job is in its name. It is to enforce. It is to be the visible arm of otherwise ephemeral law that we agreed upon as society through, hopefully, some sort of consensus. And yes, their presence also serves that purpose, but they are not there to punish ( although I am sure we are all tempted to tip scales at times ). That job is typically the domain of another public institution.
Crossing "T"s, dotting the "I"s. For a case this high profile it definitely pays to be diligent. It'll be interesting to see exactly what the evidence is and how the investigation unfolded.
It does seem a little off that a perpetrator of such a crime wouldn't run, either. Either go straight to the police with "it was self defense" or get the hell out of the country.
"admitting that SF has a crime problem". It does have crime problems, drug problems and homeless problems. Since this topic was about violent crime sure you can admit it has a violent crime problems but it's no more than normal, in fact below average in the USA.
It's the same demographic around here that pride themselves with thinking they are cold hard rationalists that also steadfastly refuse to look at SFs actual violent crime statistics to compare to the rest of the country.
I don't get it. Are you saying that Republican policies are ruining the city? Or are you saying that the established laws and regulations have nothing to do with the problem at all?
The GP said “So are all the right wingers gonna apologize for pinning this on street crime?”
My point is in agreement with the GP the right wing media loves to crap all over SF/LA and talk about how democrats are ruining the (country, city, XYZ). The parent comment didn’t seem to understand what they were referring to, so I gave a link that was a quick google away.
I'm not arguing. I'm saying that we know don't know if it definitely was Democrat policies that created the problem, but we definitely know it wasn't Republican ones. For all we actually know they could be right. Can't be upset at that, especially while lacking any sort of plan or process to deal with the problem.
I personally think the great weather is just as much factor as anything else. If I were homeless in North Dakota, I'd be doing whatever it took to get to warm weather. Now couple that I know the city won't take down my tent or throw me in jail, move me, will feed, cloth, and give me helpful things, yea, probably sounds like a decent plan vs freezing to death after being hassled by authorities.
It shouldn't be a crime to be unfortunate, but it's also not sustainable to have 60,000 (admitted, but probably closer to 80-100k) homeless people in LA alone.
So, I present a steelman style question... What if they're right? How would we know? And would it be helpful to dump on media outlets that talked about just because we didn't want to see it?
Why it is no one can even remotely entertain the possibility they might be wrong?
I don’t think it was a democrat or republican that was responsible for the murder of Bob Lee, which is the context here. And with it the right wing media who used it as another bullet in their non-stop culture wars and fear mongering for votes.
If you’re asking why is it that SF has the problems it does, well that’s very complicated. WWII imports of African-Americans to build ships soon out of jobs, various displaced groups by the booms and busts, vast social benefits that attract homeless as most other places lack it, supportive liberal policies that nurture it, one party rule that goes uncontested, homeless-industrial complex that pisses away money without any consequences, growing income inequality in one of the most expensive places in the world, liberal population who want to help versus hurt/jail/eliminate the vulnerable, street drugs that have become more and more lethal and addictive over time, laissez faire attitudes about drug consumption and sales, warm weather, population that enables panhandling, other states that buy one way bus tickets for their homeless, CA laws that basically prevent people from going to prison for many non-violent crimes, etc etc.
This is HN so I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole. I’m not suggesting anyone is innocent, but the two “sides” are not equivalent at all. Watch 10 minutes of Fox News or Newsmax versus 10 minutes of anything else and the difference is extremely stark.
That's just your perspective and indicative of how far left you are. You don't realize where the overton window has shifted.
I'm going to lay something down on you, the 2008 John Stewart version of Fox News that you're fighting in your head... Doesn't exist. Fox is FAR MORE controlled opposition than a source of conservative values.
You’re making assumptions about my political leanings that are actually incorrect.
I’m not sure what you mean by controlled opposition, and I don’t understand how that opposes the idea that it’s where culture wars are non-stop fought.
Wow this is crazy. Now I feel like I don't need to know anything more. He was an awesome programmer and an awesome guy. I think we can just leave it there, no?
Allegedly killed someone, but let's share his identity with everyone anyway! Who cares if we're wrong in the end, right? What kind of impact could that possibly have?
First off-- Nima is a person of interest. It doesn't mean he's guilty of anything. Even if they were in a car together, argued and Bob left the car and walked it doesn't mean Nima killed the man.
I assume (and hope) the police have more solid evidence like a fingerprint on that knife or Nima's own blood/DNA at the scene or on the knife as is common with stabbings.
You cease to be "a person of interest" and become the suspect right about when the cops drive across the Bay Bridge to pick you up and bring you to jail.
When you put a violent criminal to death, the crime rate is permanently and instantly lowered. If you lock them in a cage for 20 years we all pay the bills and they end up coming out and murdering again on the first day out. Total insanity.
Wasn’t it a common perception among San Francisco residents that the security in San Francisco was getting worse, as shown by the testimony of Jake Shields, a friend of Bob Lee, who said that his girlfriend was attacked by a robber, even though it was a coincidence that the one who killed Bob Lee was an acquaintance? Besides, didn’t Bob Lee himself move to Miami because of the bad security in San Francisco?
>Besides, didn’t Bob Lee himself move to Miami because of the bad security in San Francisco?
No:
>But Krista Lee emphasized that her ex-husband, with whom they have two children, loved San Francisco and moved to Florida to live with his father after his mom died, not because he was scared to live in the city.
edit: it still doesn't make sense to me. If someone I know stabs me and I assume I have few minutes to live and call 911, I would say "help, Joe Doe stabbed me". I wouldn't say "someone", because that implies a stranger.
People writing the name of their murderer in blood on the floor is a murder-mystery staple; it is not real life.
In real life you're in shock and what you do is completely disconnected from what you think you would do. The "watch people die" video collections show that, someone can be obviously dying (massive gunshot wounds, etc) and they carry on like nothing happened until they fall over dead.
I don't think you ever been shot at, had you? I had, and being in shock first thing I did when called 911 was shouting the name of perpetrator for close to a minute, before I realized they already know who may have killed me, and now its actually time to tell them what's happening with me.
Again, it doesn't seem normal to say "someone shot me", if you know WHO shot you.
I hope this brings some measure of peace and closure for his family and friends.