The two groups that talk about crime are more or less equal in their self-delusion. The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem and the right-wing folks insist such and such a place is a warzone and anyone who goes there should be afraid.
Mind you there are plenty of people who are fairly reasonable who you don't see talking about these things publicly much, usually because the people who respond are so very obnoxious.
You have people denying reality vs. people exaggerating it, neither really have very good information.
I have personally experienced both. I left a formerly nicer neighborhood that took a turn to avoid robberies and too frequent gun shots for downtown where I feel much safer... and manage to offend both sides when I mention this.
The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem
I'm not familiar with anyone, at least in the mainstream of politics, doing this. I think it is important to note the mainstream, because we do have tons of elected officials and mainstream cable news talking heads making the "warzone" argument (and deliberately mischaracterizing any attempts at police or justice system reform).
I know many people personally who do it in conversations with me. Locally we have a county attorney who ran and won on, essentially, a platform to not prosecute crimes. She's done such a bad job that in a few egregious cases the state attorney general took cases over.
It has gotten to the point where there are liberal-talking-point topics that I just don't address with good friends in the same way you avoid anything political with the slightly unhinged conservative uncle.
I'm not familiar with anyone, at least in the mainstream of politics, who is talking about crime and criminals in a way that seems like they are actually interested in making the situation better.
I have yet to see a politician who has ran on "not prosecuting crime" and winning. It's a batshit crazy mega unpopular opinion that we should not prosecute crime so I'm shocked you are so close to someone who was able to succeed on that.
Can you share who this person is so I can look up what they ran on?
Of course she said she'd be tough vaguely on violent crime, then but then what she actually meant which was
"In addition to prosecution and incarceration in appropriate cases, Mary’s approach to community safety will include:
* Offering restorative justice practices as an option for victims.
* Advocating for community-based alternatives to incarceration in appropriate cases, including supporting these alternatives at the legislature and pushing for increased funding.
* Partnering with schools, families, and others to ensure children who commit crimes have options with structure and support to help them succeed.
Closely coordinating with community corrections officials to improve the quality and effectiveness of supervision."
One of the most egregious cases involved two teenagers who were paid to kill a young mother, they broke down her door and shot her to death in the middle of the night. Moriarty offered them a plea deal for less than 2 years in juvenile detention.
Ooooooof yikes. It's weird because on one side I agree with her that we are punishing the youth who commit small crimes too hard, but on the other hand I think murder is a different beast entirely. If what I've read about the case is right I think it's awful what was done.
Doesn't seem to be much support for her from my brief search online. So that's a bonus.
> The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem and the right-wing folks insist such and such a place is a warzone and anyone who goes there should be afraid.
This is contextual and is misleading without it.
But it does accurately represent the ineptitude of the left and why it always loses in these situations. Here's how it goes:
Problem: Society has people that are poor and mentally challenged. Both turn to drugs to cope. Drugs are illegal, increased demand increases criminality. Drug use exacerbates poverty, homelessness. Society becomes full of drug users committing petty crimes, and drug dealers perpetuating major crimes to contribute to supply. Not to mention addicts dying in the streets from overdoses.
All of this in general make cities undesirable and less safe.
RIGHT-WING Solution: LET'S GET TOUGH ON CRIME.
Drug dealers get arrested. Drug users get arrested.
For a little while the streets are cleaner and safer, and everyone is happy. But the root cause hasn't been addressed, so the same problems just return.
LEFT-WING Solution: Drug use is a symptom not a root cause. And criminality is inherent to drug trade because drugs are illegal. If we legalize or decriminalize drugs we reduce the criminal element. If we give people safe injection sites they don't have to die from overdoses. And if we fund social programs we can get people out of poverty, off the streets, and into housing.
PROBLEM 1: All of this is a lot harder than sending a dozen cops into a tent city and arresting a dozen homeless people.
PROBLEM 2: Even if carried out PERFECTLY, there becomes an intermediate step where homeless people are seen being given funds or housing from the government which makes poor-but-not-homeless, and even middle-class people get mad saying "I work so hard, how come this person who is clearly a loser is getting all these handouts? This makes people petty and the right wing seize on it.
PROBLEM 3: Going soft on drug use means in the short term you have people using drugs more openly, but not being arrested for it. This makes people grossed out and the right wing seize on it.
Before you know it and before any meaningful improvements have been made, you have right wing candidates screaming that all of the problems of society are because the left is too soft, and we need to get tougher. And they usually succeed and they usually win. Because the best the left wing can do is point to statistics that show fewer homeless people are dying of poverty or drug overdoses, and the truth is most humans in society just don't care. So they deny and minimize.
The reality is that out of sight out of mind, most gentle moderate even somewhat progressive people would be just as happy if homeless people "disappeared". They don't want to think about what that means. So they vote left when they feel guilty, and right when they're annoyed.
> The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem and the right-wing folks insist such and such a place is a warzone and anyone who goes there should be afraid.
Some left wing folks will agree you should be afraid but only if you're female/black etc because men/white people might attack you. But they'll insist if you're a white man then you're protected from crime by "privilege".
Which is interesting because statistically men are much more often victims of violent crime.
I'm not how you get a "both sides" argument from that data, but OK. We're in the same phase of this debate that we are with inflation: there was a burst of signal, driven largely by the pandemic and related causes, it receeded, but argumentation is still informed by feelings and not current state.
(Edit: and the amount of argumentation below trying to refute this one link WITHOUT ALTERNATIVE SUPPORTING EVIDENCE is pretty much proof that this isn't a fight about facts.)
Statistics from the police is the least accurate way to measure minor crimes, those stats mostly tracks how active the police is and not how much crime there is.
Or do you believe that Denmark and Sweden has the most cases of thefts in the world? These stats has nothing to do with how much theft is actually happening.
Are there better numbers? It seems like these track existing conventional wisdom about the recent crime burst, no? You're just trying to throw out the last 2 years showing a decline? Is that really a reasonable argument?
Obviously yes, there's an apples/oranges problem with comparing data sets collected in different countries under different law enforcement regimes, etc...
But between e.g. 2022 and 2017 in San Francisco specifically? I don't see the argument.
(Also important to note that while "Larceny" might be plausibly related to police ignoring crime, other things like "Murder" are very much not if you aren't accusing the police of hiding bodies. And violent crime shows the same trend.)
It is much more likely that the police changed a bit on how they report things than that the population at large changed. The real changes gets lost in the noise of police reporting changes. Police reporting changes not just via bureaucratic decisions but also the feelings of the police force in general because it is the people at the bottom that decides what to report, which is very fickle and can change quickly with reasons like "we catch thieves but they just get released, so we stopped caring".
Covid likely changed crime rates, yes, but it likely changed police reporting rates much more. That goes for all kinds of events. Saying crime is down since police reporting is down is like saying that kids learn more today since they get better grades today than 10 years ago.
Edit: You get much better numbers by asking people if they have been robbed lately, or asking stores how much gets stolen.
"Are there better numbers?" is not a question that justifies trusting bad numbers. If the best numbers you have are known to be unreliable, using them just because you don't have better ones is not justified.
Let's say the real amount per year for the last 10 years is [100, 110, 120, 130, 140], and you have numbers that show [90, 89, 88, 87, 86]. Those numbers are much better than [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It would still be absolutely wrong to use them to figure out the trend.
If you know your source of data is bad, you must throw it out, even if it's the best one you have. If our data is bad, we just don't know.
We should be careful about the "it's the best we got" phase of the argument. It usually doesn't add information, but pushes the convo as though it does. Presenting numbers is additive, questioning those numbers relevancy can be additive. Of course the "best we got" might not be good enough to make a call.
In this argument, the sides are something like crime is down, crime is up, and don't have enough info. Roughly speaking, you're arguing for the first over the second whereas the responder is arguing for not enough info.
Even in situations where maybe you have to make a decision and don't have great data, if you don't feel great about the best info you have, then it might be better to use something else like the wisdom or gut instinct of the team or what's cheapest or what you're most able to walk back later. Data tends to make us lazy about digging deeper, it's okay when the data is good, but worse no data when it's not so relevant.
There are probably better numbers somewhere. Likely several sets worth. One of the things that makes SF's numbers especially thorny is that SFPD engages in a daily campaign to deter reporting crime.
This makes the official numbers known unreliable, but also means there's lots of room to debate how much more reliable any alternative set of numbers might be.
> Statistics from the police is the least accurate way to measure minor crimes, those stats mostly tracks how active the police is and not how much crime there is.
Bullshit. You're applying census logic to crime statistics to sow FUD. The census doesn't count people who hide from the government. That does not mean we cannot trust census data, just that it isn't flawless.
It's a count of crimes reported by citizens. You can drill down further to see which ones stuck through to arrests and convictions. This is the closest to actual data we're ever going to come in measuring a concept like "crime."
The problem is that the stats tell a wildly different story than what progressives want to hear, so they move to discredit the police and their data with academic vagaries like "overpolicing." Let's examine that.
Police supposedly overpatrol black communities. Besides Wayne Williams and the DC snipers, can you name any black serial killers?
Something like 35% of all serial killings in America are committed by black males (4-5 victims each, and this does not include gang shootings!). The implication is that if police "overpoliced" white areas in the same way, there would be a similar rise in body count from white perpetrators. White communities should be knee-deep in their dead by this logic, yet I don't see anybody complaining about all the corpses in the streets. The act of policing does not "generate" murder victims. Black men just kill a lot of people and it's an uncomfortable truth.
Domestic violence is the other big lie we swallow. Men stopped beating their wives, so women invented new reasons to claim victimhood. Now just yelling at them is reframed as assault in the social sphere, and we're presented no end of excuses for why "rape" can't be reported to the police. It's not spousal rape anymore, it's more-vague "consent violation." Adhering to agreements that are subject to arbitrary change is impossible and unenforceable, but if you run afoul of it, they run to social media telling "their" truth (which is notably distinct from "the" truth). Nobody asks your side or gives you a fair hearing. They immediately isolate you from friends and family and sever your means of financial support. This is literally vigilante domestic violence against men, committed by the "victims," in plain sight, with public support. Believing women (or anybody else) without evidence is the flag of a fool. Police report or it didn't happen.
Here's the truth: the argument of overpolicing was applicable only to property crime, but through sophistry the left reframes it to look like it applies to all crime, the stats are faulty and all cops are bastards. Every bit of this is exaggeration for political effect.
It would not surprise me in the least if Denmark or Sweden did in fact have the highest rates of property theft. You have pickpockets, high density, and are welcoming of refugees and gypsies. I trust the stats. I don't trust you.
> It would not surprise me in the least if Denmark or Sweden did in fact have the highest rates of property theft. You have pickpockets, high density, and are welcoming of refugees and gypsies. I trust the stats. I don't trust you.
You really think they have 5 times more theft than Poland or 15 times more than Mexico? The total numbers doesn't make sense, countries are all over the place regardless of their situation or stability.
Also that data is from 2003, it is before Sweden had taken in a significant amount of new immigrants. There were no security anywhere because it wasn't needed, and shops didn't close due to excessive theft. How can that be worse than a country where stores has to put products behind bars and put security guards to protect themselves, and still sometimes have to close due to the issues?
Many jobs and retailers have left SF. It's not surprising that statistics got "better". Also the police will have had a lot of pressure on them to make the statistics better, they're not to be trusted to publish good statistics.
I could find lists of store closures and numbers of jobs gone, but instead one data point: whole foods closing an enormous store after only one year.
That either means what they say: crime was a huge problem, or they're covering for bad sales: people have left.
And the world isn't just SF. Locally I've been in line at a coffee shop twice this year while somebody stole something from the grab and go case and ran... there aren't any more grab and go cases or merchandise at several coffee shops. It wasn't long ago that I could go to the local target and buy things off shelves instead of waiting for someone to open the case with a key.
Just about every category in your chart shows a reversal from a downward trend before 2019 into an upward trend from 2019 onward. The precipitous and unusual drop at the end of the axis reflects a lack of data.
Just about every kind of crime is up in Portland as well over 2018 numbers, with homicides almost quadrupling 3 years later.
The “both sides” should be considered, because Portland isn’t a war-zone like the far right would portray it as, but it’s significantly worse than it used to be with no reversal in sight. There are worse places to live in the US today, but I’m not off-base for wanting safety and local quality of life to improve rather than decline when compared to previous years.
And sure, the next thing to blame is the pandemic recovery. We all faced drastic changes over the last few years, but objectively some of our cities (like Portland where I live) are not recovering as well or at all compared to national trends.
And as for Portland, most of our deteriorating trends started before the pandemic. 2020-2022 just accelerated their trajectories.
> Just about every category in your chart shows a reversal from a downward trend before 2019 into an upward trend from 2019 onward
Literally every category in that chart shows a reduction in crime over the last year. You're inventing a "trend" by extrapolating a line straight across an outlier (the covid pandemic). No one would look at that data and say crime is getting worse. You'd say crime got worse and is now back at baseline.
Why? It's not a real time measurement, they're just adding up the crimes from the 2023 data. Do you expect the 2023 numbers to be revised? Was that true for earlier years? Seems unlikely.
Hard science people tend to worship data and dismiss anecdotes, but a situation where the data is incomplete/incorrect (for whatever reason) and anecdotes which point in a different direction are, in fact, correct, is perfectly plausible. For example, the former Soviet Bloc was unmatched in its ability to produce impressive statistics of various achievements, but the real living standard of the people would strike you in the face the moment you would see it. Which is why the secret police often restricted free movement of Western visitors.
SF is pretty bad. A few weeks ago, Czech TV reporters were robbed at a gunpoint in broad daylight [0]. Stuff like that simply doesn't happen in Prague, Warsaw or even war-torn, PTSD-heavy Kyiv. It rather corresponds to South African standards of safety. IDK if you can explain it away with positively sounding statistics, but as Feynman says, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
If a culture war coded topic like crime is being discussed and tribal loyalty kicks in, I can imagine people simply ignoring anything that goes contrary to their position and rallying to the flag.
FWIW, with more guns than people, the USA is the most armed country in the world. It follows that being robbed at gunpoint isn't something that is frequent in a country where there's only 1 gun per 40 people. The same people arguing about violent crime in the USA could do themselves a huge favor by being open to more gun control, but by and large, they are against it.
Does the pattern of armed robberies at daylight correlate with the pattern of gun ownership across the US, or no?
If not, the causality may be a lot more complicated. People don't turn into gangsters just by owning more guns. As you mention, USA is the most armed country in the world, which means that Latin American countries have, theoretically, fewer guns than the US. But they have a lot more gang violence, so much more that LatAm cities fill the "top 50 violent cities in the world" category, with barely any representants from the Old World (AFAIK only Johannesburg is up to par).
The same people arguing about violent crime in the USA could do themselves a huge favor by being open to more gun control, but by and large, they are against it.
Oh, there are multiple reasons for gun violence in the US (in decreasing importance from easy access to guns). Replace "gun control" with anything that might reduce it and this statement is still probably true.
I could just as easily list off several countries that have strict gun control and at the same time also violent crime rates (including those with guns) that are far worse than general levels in the U.S. gun control by itself isn't the problem when it comes to violence. Other, largely social and political factors are much more important, but that's not a neat ideological talking point so it gets ignored more often.
I like SF, and it's violent crime rate isn't too bad.
But, c'mon, you can't point to property crime and say "this isn't a fight about facts" when it's the 4th highest property crime per capita city in the entire country in a country that already has high crime for the developed world.
Mind you there are plenty of people who are fairly reasonable who you don't see talking about these things publicly much, usually because the people who respond are so very obnoxious.
You have people denying reality vs. people exaggerating it, neither really have very good information.
I have personally experienced both. I left a formerly nicer neighborhood that took a turn to avoid robberies and too frequent gun shots for downtown where I feel much safer... and manage to offend both sides when I mention this.