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.

Very privileged take there. My wife justifiably feels unsafe in our similar city:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35531439

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.

I was assaulted twice and didn't report.

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...

> 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.

> People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience".

Hmmm. This is kind of an interesting question. If people are safe, but don't feel safe, is it the city government's responsibility to fix that?

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.

> People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience".

When I first visited Shanghai I was surprised how safe it felt.

Walking around at 3 AM and I didn't feel nervous at all.