So much of the problem in SF comes down to the progressive politician types who only want to things that "impact the root causes of crime" and its extremely frustrating and frequently just plain wrong. Yes, you do not solve the "root problem of why people choose to commit crime" by putting repeat offenders in jail, but you do make the world way better for everyone else who is not a criminal. Poor people, immigrants, the downtrodden all disproportionately benefit from tough on crime policies because they are the people for whom have the least resources to isolate themselves from the chaos and antisocial behaviors of the worst among us. Its not a white kids in the marina that need to walk past piles of shit and needles to get to school, its the poor immigrant kids in the tenderloin who need to deal with this.
> So much of the problem in SF comes down to the progressive politician types who only want to things that "impact the root causes of crime" and its extremely frustrating and frequently just plain wrong.
It's getting bad in LA as well. I've lived in Westwood (UCLA) and now Santa Monica since I went to school here around 2012. You'd always see homeless people every now and then, but they were mostly isolated to encampments and the "bad areas." Not anymore. I walk around a lot and work in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, and in the past year, I've witnessed people shooting up literally next to a kid's playground, I've been offered meth in the middle of the street (at like 10am in the morning, mind you), I hear people screaming/yelling at the top of their lungs outside of my apartment at midnight, had to dodge human poop in the middle of a sidewalk, a homeless person used my garage (the door was stuck open for a few weeks until someone came out to fix it) as a drug den, etc.
I'm literally considering running for city council to try to fix this. We changed the city government a few years ago, but it's gotten worse, not better. It's honestly insane. I have a few friends that just had babies and I have no idea how you could raise a child in a city like this. When I get married/have kids, I'm not sure I would stay here.
Are we talking Arizona St. or Santa Monica Blvd or Sotel or west of the 405 here? Because Santa Monica Blvd. has been pretty bad for decades. That Starbucks/parklet area at Santa Monica and Bundy has been the worst for a long while.
People like to blame the politicians for what’s happening. However the politicians are not electing themselves.
The problem is the people who with great intentions make things worse. Wait a few minutes until someone posts that “statistically it doesn’t happen and you are wrong”.
Eliminating the root causes of crime is a noble goal. Of course you can treat both the root cause and the symptoms, but if you want to get at the root cause, you have to know what the root cause is.
Of course nothing complex has a single root cause. The main one I'm seeing though is extremely addictive drugs, specifically Meth and Fentanyl. A certain percentage of people, if they try these drugs, will become hopelessly addicted until they are living on the street stealing to buy more drugs. SF seems unwilling to do anything to disrupt this cycle.
So I believe we put too many people in jail for too long. I think our justice system is pretty broken. Having said that, to fix it I never thought of just letting people commit crimes like areas in California seem to be doing. That's just as asinine but in the other direction.
I always imagined giving people much lighter sentences for most things and if they repeat, then give them harsher and harsher sentences. Only the worst repeat offenders would get what they get today. I imagined not overcharging people hoping to scare someone into a plea. I imagined police not being able to interrogate and lie to children without a parent present. I imagined getting rid of pre textual stops to get innocent people's id's. I imagined "I smell marijuana," as not allowable probable cause. I imagined removing most K9 units. I imagined removing most SWAT units except for the largest cities. I imagined being able to remove bad police, bad prosecutors and bad judges from their positions of power. I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.
The guy who hit the marina person on the head with a pipe was considered a "frequent flyer" by the SF police. They have tons (like 20+) of complaints against this person and the group they live with for various things like drug use, menacing behavior, starting fights, stealing, etc. A few businesses on the street have restraining orders on this person preventing them from entering for example the walgreens. A large issue we have with our criminal justice system in CA/SF right now is that "low level" non felony crimes (like theft of less than 950 dollars, public drug use, pooping in the street, menacing others), are treated more or less like an administrative issue and the criminal might be fined, but they won't be jailed, and there isn't an escalation policy where more and more low level crimes result in an escalation of consequences. This means that people can repeatedly perform extremely anti social behaviors (street shitting, public meth smoking, stealing 200 dollars of whatever from a store, threatening people and screaming) over and over and over again without an escalation of consequences for their actions. There is an escalation policy for things like murder or other felony crimes, but these escalations usually take a long time, and the end result is the repeat offenders do kill or cause serious harm before they are put in prison and taken out of society.
> So I believe we put too many people in jail for too long. I think our justice system is pretty broken. Having said that, to fix it I never thought of just letting people commit crimes like areas in California seem to be doing. That's just as asinine but in the other direction.
> I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.
This is a myth. Police everywhere prioritize violent crimes. Jails and prisons everywhere prioritize retaining violent criminals and when they have to, attempt to release the lowest risk offenders. When people have been prematurely released from jail it is not out of misplaced compassion. Mostly people are being released because the system is already at capacity. In fact many jails in the U.S. are well above capacity before they decide to release people. Some as much as 150%
No matter where you are, a lot of violent crime goes un-solved. That has been true for decades. People cover up their crimes and many are reasonably good at it.
The rise in crime during and following the pandemic has been significant for small, medium and large cities regardless of the policies adopted by those cities and regardless of the overriding politics of the state they are situated in.
> Its not white kids in the marina that need to walk past piles of shit and needles
Cue Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs theory: Many rich white liberals support policies that lead to crime/chaos because it signals their high status and the options it affords (ie. I’ll just move to my other house in Marin if SF gets too crazy)
> So much of the problem in SF comes down to the progressive politician types who only want to things that "impact the root causes of crime" and its extremely frustrating and frequently just plain wrong. Yes, you do not solve the "root problem of why people choose to commit crime" by putting repeat offenders in jail, but you do make the world way better for everyone else who is not a criminal.
AND by doing that you do harm, by perpetuating racist systems of of injustice and oppression. The only way to solve that more important problem is by addressing the root causes and allow longer term healing to happen.
Yes, that means some people will be inconvenienced, but that's acceptable and a necessary part of the solution. The only way to speed that phase up is to implement comprehensive reparations quickly.
> Tragic video shows dying Cash App founder Bob Lee was ignored by bystanders as he begged for help after being stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday…Footage showed Lee lifted his shirt to show [a] driver his two stab wounds — but collapsed to the ground as the car drove off…Lee raised one arm in an attempt to flag down [another] car and jumped back onto his feet, but the driver sped away…
This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?
I am pretty sure I might have ignored this in San Francisco, but probably not in other cities. I have walked next to people that looked injured, and harmed before in SF and not batted an eye, because nobody else did. It quite frankly is a city that numbs you to human suffering on the street.
Would and have. I was in a bad part of town (not SF) at night, and two people flagged me down on the street. When I stopped (door locked, window down half an inch, in gear and ready to peel out), one stayed in the middle of the street, and the other walked over and said, "My buddy's been stabbed. Can you get us to the hospital?" So I drove them to the ER.
Another time this guy was screaming on the street, with blood running down his face. He'd been mugged, and the mugger pistol-whipped him when he didn't have anything worth taking. I took him to the ER, too. I'm rather grateful to him - he used my kleenex to avoid turning my passenger seat into a biohazard area. Not a drop on my seat or floor.
Personally, I think my reaction to seeing extremely violent crime would be to run away and try not to get involved. I'm not going to watch the video, but that was my first thought.
When bleeding homeless people have come up to me in SF (not uncommon) I usually just try to move on. I assume a similar reaction here, though I don't know if I'd have been able to tell this was a Normal Person who was dying.
I once tried helping a drunken homeless man that was throwing up blood at 1 in the morning when I was on my way to the office to pick up some paperwork. My phone died the moment I took it out of my pocket to call an ambulance. I spend the next 30 minutes trying to get the guy help including calling the intercom of a hospice/clinic around the corner. I ended up talking to another homeless woman who impersonated a doctor on the intercom of the hospice to get them to call an ambulance.
Where I live it's impossible to imagine not stopping for someone with their hood open on the side of the road, let alone if they were physically injured. Big snow days are so much fun, with everyone helping to dig and push each other out of big snow banks, grinning and laughing.
Communities are made of people who look out for each other. If you put enough people together who don't, you've created something else entirely.
I helped carry a semi-passed out homeless-looking man in an undefined state to an ambulance uphill through snow this winter. Not sure if he had any injuries, but he wasn't cooperative.
I mean, Jesus. Not trying to argue with you at all, but if that's the gut reaction to a man bleeding out with two stab wounds ... man, you gotta move, you're too hardened.
I think people get scared and then panic. Not many folks are used to being around a person who is bleeding from a stab wound.
I was walking home through a park and saw a girl who was slumped over and it looked like she was dead. My heart started pounding, for some reason it scared me pretty badly. I went and found the police and they refused to even believe me. I then found another homeless person and asked her to check (part of the reason I didn't want to go near is that I'm a male).
The greater "crime in sf" conversation is ultimately about establishing that the misery in front of you is not your concern. We did this so we could feel justified in ignoring homelessness, but it will also be used to ignore you, if you're dying in the street.
I'm not convinced it's so nefarious. When the problem is this big, individuals eventually feel unable to help; not to mention that the mental health aspect causes people to (rightfully?) fear erratic/dangerous behavior. West Coast cities are putting massive amounts of money into the problem, but the problem is so much bigger than they can reasonably handle when people are able to move from other locales to cities with more services. It's a national problem and we're collectively blaming SF/LA/Seattle/Portland for not solving it.
The last time I was in San Francisco was January of 2020 - I was staying near the convention center and I was surprised by how open the drug use had become. I’d been traveling the city off and on for around 20 years, and while you could always find someone doing drugs if you went looking, I wasn’t used to seeing groups of people huddled on the sidewalk openly injecting what I imagine was heroin and/or fentanyl. Nobody seemed to mind. I also saw a guy who was so out of his mind on something, leaning up against a mailbox, that it took him several seconds to realize his pants had fallen down and several more to do something about it. This gentleman was not wearing any underwear. Again, it didn’t seem to shock or bother any of the numerous people walking by, some of them with small children. It was very, very strange.
The most frustrating part about the conversation is that politics takes away the fundamental fact that what is happening in the city is not normal and there is no one else to blame for it other than the city officials, not the pandemic, not the wfh tech workers, just the city.
You can’t separate the two. CA has made drugs and misdemeanor crimes effectively un-policeable. Billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been given to nonprofits to improve homeless conditions but they’ve only gotten worse while the nonprofit operators grow rich. People exploit loopholes in the safety nets to get money for drugs. These are all unintended consequences of poorly conceived policy making.
> CA has made drugs and misdemeanor crimes effectively un-policeable.
This is only a problem if "policing" these crimes actually removes them. All evidence shows that unless you just intend to permanently lock up all homeless people (therefore giving them....housing), policing drugs and poverty doesn't fix the problems for anyone
> Billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been given to nonprofits to improve homeless conditions
True. The west coast has a massive homeless problem. And a progressive government. So they invest in trying to fix it.
> but they’ve only gotten worse
Housing inequality has also gotten massively worse over the last several decades. And in general many other social programs have gotten defunding (Such as mental health support)
And in general North America-wide drug usage is only going up and indicators of despair are going up.
Western society has problems and we are not dealing with the root causes. Middle-class millennials have resigned themselves to never owning a house, and never being able to retire. While they have a social safety net from their boomer parents, it's not yet a crisis. When the boomer parents spend all their accumulated wealth to survive the last decade of their lives, it will become a societal crisis.
But the early signs are already being shown by the lower class.
My point is that we don't know HOW MUCH WORSE the problem would be if those organizations weren't in place. For all we know, they are dramatically reducing the rate of regression.
> while the nonprofit operators grow rich.
[citation needed].
This is an absolutely ubiquitous conservative talking point but the only evidence I see of it is that people working for these non profits make living wages (good, shouldn't they be able to?), and the CEOs of these companies make comparable money to CEOs of profitable organizations. Which...is good, isn't it? Don't you WANT to be able to hire the best people for these roles, and don't you need competitive comp to be able to attract it.
> People exploit loopholes in the safety nets to get money for drugs.
Drug addicts will do almost anything to do drugs. The root causes of drug addiction may be character weakness (they're not, but we don't need to have that debate today) but once someone is addicted, it doesn't matter what happened - they have a medical disease, and treating it as anything but does not help anyone.
But if we want to help people not become drug addicts we need to deal with the underlying societal causes of despair.
> These are all unintended consequences of poorly conceived policy making.
You're right. For instance, one terribly conceived policy is policing this problem and spending millions of dollars to lock up people in jails and prisons for this instead of just spending money on socialized subsidized housing.
A social safety net from housing to universal basic income will dramatically reduce the problems in questions.
But even in the most progressive cities of North America, this is just not on the table. And instead when people speak about "bad policy" what they're really saying is "I want to see MORE police".
Why? I'm happy to blame the city official partially, but isn't it significant that SF, more than other big cities, was dependent on tech tenants who have largely gone remote?
That's not entirely true. You may not live in SF but only work in SF. In this situation you have no say in SF government because your voting rights are based on where you stay and not where you work. Maybe there needs to be a way to better distribute your vote? If you're in a place for about 1/2 your waking hours of the week, maybe you should get a say in the government of that place?
Edit: This is a situation with most metro areas. Definitely with Chicago where there is a large contingent of folks who commute from the suburbs.
People generally only elect what they find to be the least detestable of the faux-representatives that their party strategists and financial backers put forth.
It's possible for harmful but popular policy to go forward with no one but your average constituent to blame, but when every option is a different set of false promises and failures to execute, and "the discourse" is driven mostly by dollar-driven propagandists, it's hard to place the blame for dysfunctional government on voters generally.
People generally only elect what they find to be the least detestable of the faux-representatives that their party strategists and financial backers put forth.
It's possible for harmful but popular policy to go forward with no one but your average constituent to blame, but when every option is a different set of false promises and failures to execute, and "the discourse" is driven mostly by dollar-driven propagandists, it's hard to place the blame for disfunctional government on voters generally.
it's a mistake to believe that any major political party adheres to a principled political philosophy, but it's true that single-party politics is ripe for corruption, which is CA (especially SF and LA) in a nutshell. it's much easier for money to talk when only one party is listening. this is the same dynamic that antitrust in commerce is meant to prevent. politicians spend something like 80% of their time now soliciting donations, even in single-party areas, which is very telling of their priorities (rhetoric be damned).
Except for the fact that what is happening in San Francisco is completely normal. All violent crime stats in SF are still trending downward. The only increase in crime is non-violent theft, and the current rates are just a return to pre-pandemic levels, which makes sense given that there were far fewer opportunities for people to interact during the pandemic. And all of these crime rates are relatively the same or even better than the rest of the country.
What you're experiencing is confirmation bias. You read about one crime, then started noticing all of the stories about crime, formed a theory based on this hyper focusing, and now you believe it's worse than ever despite the stats clearly showing otherwise.
What I am experiencing is data being misused. I've lived in the Bay Area for more than a decade and yeah, it's not as violent as the 90s, but compared to a decade ago, violence is increasing.
If you are a resident, you very well know that a huge portion of crimes, violent or not, are not being reported because of the end result. Property crime is through the roof. My car has been broken into 3 times in the last year or so. Before that, I've only had my car broken into once in a decade before. I've had to call the police 3-4 times (apart from the car break ins) in the last 2 years for individuals in crisis, sometimes threatening violence. I never had to do it in the decade before. In fact, the first time I had to do it, I wasn't sure if I call 911 and had to look up the non emergency line. Yes, all of this is anecdotal or "personal experience", but talking to everyone I know around me, all of their "personal experiences" have only gotten worse recently. Which makes me believe that at this point, the data paints as accurate picture as anecdotes these days.
> What you're experiencing is confirmation bias. You read about one crime, then started noticing all of the stories about crime, formed a theory based on this hyper focusing, and now you believe it's worse than ever despite the stats clearly showing otherwise.
Exactly. The whole "crime is terrible in SF" is just a Republican propaganda narrative that people who should know better are buying into.
All west coast hippie liberal cities are experiencing it, so it is indeed normal.
Same shit in SF, Portland, Seattle, and even Vancouver CA!
It's a PNW problem. We are simply too libertarian and hate cops too much. Everyone else in this thread thinks it's something else. It's not. People here fucking hate cops and will turn society to anarchy to be rid of them.
Either way, shouldn't San Fran have plenty of money from all the tech there and plenty of extra office real estate from covid to try and put a dent in all the circumstances that lead up to someone needing to steal or getting addicted to drugs? Probably too optimistic of a take ...
Kinda silly to assume that the data is an exact reflection of reality when that link is reporting on "incidents". Especially when you can visit the city and witness stark difference compared to walking around somewhere like Miami, Houston, or New York.
Incidents are actual reports to police, not a log of all activities happening in the city. Several factors can influence reporting rates in a city, causing over or underreporting. Especially if you doubt the effectiveness and corruptibility of the police. Homicides are direct reports of victims and more accurate.
Plus, the linked article is based on the San Francisco Police Department website's crime data. Not saying that nefarious activity is the case, but has this data been audited by a 3rd party? There's definitely an incentive to show that things are better than they are if funding, elections, etc. depend on it.
I think the relevant distinction is concentration. In other US cities with relatively high crime - the crime is concentrated in certain neighborhood and is heavily related to gang activity. So you provided you can avoid certain areas, you generally are able to avoid most crime. In SF the criminality has spilt out to have a broader impact in a way the aggregate statistics might not show. Previous advice that you would probably be safe anywhere in the city other than the tenderloin no longer applies.
The number one driver of theft and drug addiction is poverty. Unless SF commits to ending poverty, which they likely won't or can't, they won't address the causes of homelessness.
SF is especially "bad" because it has an incredibly high cost-of-living. If you're living in the area without a high-paying (tech) job, you're very likely to be only one or two surprises away from losing your housing.
I'm not in SF but so many of the responses here seem highly reactive in their politicization and catastrophization of the issue. I'm in NYC, and if you were to go the subreddit for it, you'd see similar claims, which IMO, are completely off-base. Can anyone provide me w/ a reasonable take?
Systemic issues exacerbated by national political trends and rapid uneven economic growth.
Due to the very real issue of police brutality in SFPD, local politicians are opposed to increasing funding for SFPD without oversight, and a number of politicians want to decrease it due to their police brutality record.
That said, SFPD is having a hard time retaining and hiring officers as they can get better salaries elsewhere in the Bay with less overtime. Fresh out of Academy cops in San Jose can earn a $111k base that caps at $189k, but SFPD's starting base is $103k and caps at $147.5k. Even factoring overtime, SFPD comes out to less than SJPD for hours worked, and other richer suburbs can pay even more than either wth even less hours.
Add to that politicization of the SF DA's office and Public Defender's office for the exact same reason (pay sucks so political hacks from both sides of the aisle fight for control) and you have dysfunctional local law enforcement.
On top of all that, SF had massively redeveloped a lot of formerly redlined neighborhoods (Western Addition/Hayes Valley, Mid-Market/Civic Center, Mission Bay+Potrero/Hunters Point) which in turn displaced those who couldn't afford to move to cheaper working class suburbs like Antioch and Vallejo.
Add to that the very real issue of neighboring states and cities (both Republican like Nevada in the 2010s and Democrat like NYC in the late 2010s to present) bussing their basket case issues out to San Francisco.
All this lead to the dysfunction that is seen today in San Francisco.
I think its largely an issue of what you care about / what bothers you.
SF has very high property and overall crime rates. This is objective fact. It has the 4th highest property crime rate in the country, and the 7th highest overall crime rate in the country[1][2].
However, the _violent_ crime rate is only slightly above average in SF. Some people don't care much about the rampant theft; they still feel safe.
The same is true of e.g. the homelessness and drug issues. There are objectively more homeless people & drug addicts laying out on the sidewalks in SF. Some people don't care, some people are really bothered by this.
Crime in NYC is unevenly distributed. Property crimes mostly in business districts, violent crimes mostly in a few neighborhoods with gangs. If someone lives in areas most popular with well-payed software engineers like the Villages or North Brooklyn they will not encounter most of this crime. The NYPD is as large as some nation’s standing armies for a good reason, it stops crime in certain areas effectively.
Typical cope response "the crime is not happening". We're so far beyond debating whether it's happening, don't try to gaslight people. Just walk around the damn city, there's filth, drug use, harassment, tent-cities. Don't talk-down standards as if it is a requirement to live like this... we can have clean safe cities without these problems, it is only a matter of will and enforcement.
I mean what are you looking for? People are sharing anecdotes because sUpPoSeDlY the statistics say it’s 100% A-OK and nothing to see here.
SF has reached a tipping point and the wildly inflated values of multi-million dollar condos and trophy commercial buildings are falling fall enough to start putting serious wealth at risk.
NYC has gotten markedly worse in the last ten years. Some people want to signal how urbane and/or liberal they are and pretend not to notice, but that’s bs.
No one likes walking down the street and seeing a guy yelling incoherently at passing cars, or getting on a subway car and finding someone sprawled across one of the benches smelling like shit.
On one side you have reactionaries who want to solve the problem by throwing everyone in jail and generally creating more misery for everyone except rich tech workers.
On the other side you have idealistic liberals who want to solve the problem by adding more social services but taking no further action.
This is likely a problem created by extreme wealth inequality and the fix is probably not what the posters on this site would be interested in entertaining.
Every single city subreddit and local discussion is focused on crime and how high it is.
1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up.
2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared.
It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it.
3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
"In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up."
No, the statistics show that reports to the police are going down. The reports are NOT going down because crime is going down; they are going down because victims are less and less likely to report the crimes.
On a recent HN discussion on crime in SF, someone said one of the reasons it's so visible is that high income and low income sections are adjacent and intertwined. Is this true? More importantly if perhaps more crassly, is it worth it? Does not keeping your crime isolated to the "bad part of town" result in a meaningful drop in the overall crime rate?
For example, the Whole Foods that shut down in the gentrified area around 9th street is a couple blocks from Hyde & Turk - which is the main drug market in the city.
The high rises along 5th Street near Moscone are adjacent to the SROs and homeless shelters on 6th.
Similar stuff in Mission District and Polk Street/Lower Nob Hill as well - a lot of older SROs/cheap apartments got converted into Hotels, Airbnbs, or resold as condos.
And despite all this, no one noticed the intergenerational poverty and gun crime in the Projects in Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley because they are cut off from the rest of the city.
Yes. West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) consistently get talked about with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed at by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
Some people claim social services for the homeless make it "too easy" to stay unhoused. Googling the problem seems to only result in punditry and rhetoric but not any kind of meaningful analysis as to whether a "tough love" approach has any advantage over a generous one.
Specifically on high/low income intertwined, yes. There is certainly some segmentation, but there are also places where one street is good and the very next street is bad and the next street is good. It's an interesting city for sure.
Readit News
It's getting bad in LA as well. I've lived in Westwood (UCLA) and now Santa Monica since I went to school here around 2012. You'd always see homeless people every now and then, but they were mostly isolated to encampments and the "bad areas." Not anymore. I walk around a lot and work in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, and in the past year, I've witnessed people shooting up literally next to a kid's playground, I've been offered meth in the middle of the street (at like 10am in the morning, mind you), I hear people screaming/yelling at the top of their lungs outside of my apartment at midnight, had to dodge human poop in the middle of a sidewalk, a homeless person used my garage (the door was stuck open for a few weeks until someone came out to fix it) as a drug den, etc.
I'm literally considering running for city council to try to fix this. We changed the city government a few years ago, but it's gotten worse, not better. It's honestly insane. I have a few friends that just had babies and I have no idea how you could raise a child in a city like this. When I get married/have kids, I'm not sure I would stay here.
The problem is the people who with great intentions make things worse. Wait a few minutes until someone posts that “statistically it doesn’t happen and you are wrong”.
Of course nothing complex has a single root cause. The main one I'm seeing though is extremely addictive drugs, specifically Meth and Fentanyl. A certain percentage of people, if they try these drugs, will become hopelessly addicted until they are living on the street stealing to buy more drugs. SF seems unwilling to do anything to disrupt this cycle.
I always imagined giving people much lighter sentences for most things and if they repeat, then give them harsher and harsher sentences. Only the worst repeat offenders would get what they get today. I imagined not overcharging people hoping to scare someone into a plea. I imagined police not being able to interrogate and lie to children without a parent present. I imagined getting rid of pre textual stops to get innocent people's id's. I imagined "I smell marijuana," as not allowable probable cause. I imagined removing most K9 units. I imagined removing most SWAT units except for the largest cities. I imagined being able to remove bad police, bad prosecutors and bad judges from their positions of power. I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.
> I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.
This is a myth. Police everywhere prioritize violent crimes. Jails and prisons everywhere prioritize retaining violent criminals and when they have to, attempt to release the lowest risk offenders. When people have been prematurely released from jail it is not out of misplaced compassion. Mostly people are being released because the system is already at capacity. In fact many jails in the U.S. are well above capacity before they decide to release people. Some as much as 150%
No matter where you are, a lot of violent crime goes un-solved. That has been true for decades. People cover up their crimes and many are reasonably good at it.
The rise in crime during and following the pandemic has been significant for small, medium and large cities regardless of the policies adopted by those cities and regardless of the overriding politics of the state they are situated in.
Cue Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs theory: Many rich white liberals support policies that lead to crime/chaos because it signals their high status and the options it affords (ie. I’ll just move to my other house in Marin if SF gets too crazy)
AND by doing that you do harm, by perpetuating racist systems of of injustice and oppression. The only way to solve that more important problem is by addressing the root causes and allow longer term healing to happen.
Yes, that means some people will be inconvenienced, but that's acceptable and a necessary part of the solution. The only way to speed that phase up is to implement comprehensive reparations quickly.
It's okay to say "killed" here. We all know that's the true cost of these policies.
This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?
Would you have acted differently? Specially if you risk going to jail yourself if you have to use violence?
Another time this guy was screaming on the street, with blood running down his face. He'd been mugged, and the mugger pistol-whipped him when he didn't have anything worth taking. I took him to the ER, too. I'm rather grateful to him - he used my kleenex to avoid turning my passenger seat into a biohazard area. Not a drop on my seat or floor.
When bleeding homeless people have come up to me in SF (not uncommon) I usually just try to move on. I assume a similar reaction here, though I don't know if I'd have been able to tell this was a Normal Person who was dying.
Communities are made of people who look out for each other. If you put enough people together who don't, you've created something else entirely.
Dead Comment
I do not know. I’m ashamed to say but I might do the same.
You might be hit by a metal rod [1] Calling 911 will not work since police will just ignore it.
[1] https://abc7news.com/amp/sf-fire-commissioner-attack-don-car...
I was chased by a homeless man covered in blood at 8am...not a single person even bothered making eye contact
I was walking home through a park and saw a girl who was slumped over and it looked like she was dead. My heart started pounding, for some reason it scared me pretty badly. I went and found the police and they refused to even believe me. I then found another homeless person and asked her to check (part of the reason I didn't want to go near is that I'm a male).
Anyhow, I was scared.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Lack of empathy, morality, compassion- extreme selfishness
Wanting to reap all the benefits of being born in/living in a functioning society without giving anything in return…
Seeing the average human around you as a walking bag of meat to be exploited for your own gain & nothing more…
y’know, typical traits that seem to yield a bit more $USD over one’s lifetime.
Neither insinuation is supported by evidence.
This is only a problem if "policing" these crimes actually removes them. All evidence shows that unless you just intend to permanently lock up all homeless people (therefore giving them....housing), policing drugs and poverty doesn't fix the problems for anyone
> Billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been given to nonprofits to improve homeless conditions
True. The west coast has a massive homeless problem. And a progressive government. So they invest in trying to fix it.
> but they’ve only gotten worse
Housing inequality has also gotten massively worse over the last several decades. And in general many other social programs have gotten defunding (Such as mental health support)
And in general North America-wide drug usage is only going up and indicators of despair are going up.
Western society has problems and we are not dealing with the root causes. Middle-class millennials have resigned themselves to never owning a house, and never being able to retire. While they have a social safety net from their boomer parents, it's not yet a crisis. When the boomer parents spend all their accumulated wealth to survive the last decade of their lives, it will become a societal crisis.
But the early signs are already being shown by the lower class.
My point is that we don't know HOW MUCH WORSE the problem would be if those organizations weren't in place. For all we know, they are dramatically reducing the rate of regression.
> while the nonprofit operators grow rich.
[citation needed].
This is an absolutely ubiquitous conservative talking point but the only evidence I see of it is that people working for these non profits make living wages (good, shouldn't they be able to?), and the CEOs of these companies make comparable money to CEOs of profitable organizations. Which...is good, isn't it? Don't you WANT to be able to hire the best people for these roles, and don't you need competitive comp to be able to attract it.
> People exploit loopholes in the safety nets to get money for drugs.
Drug addicts will do almost anything to do drugs. The root causes of drug addiction may be character weakness (they're not, but we don't need to have that debate today) but once someone is addicted, it doesn't matter what happened - they have a medical disease, and treating it as anything but does not help anyone.
But if we want to help people not become drug addicts we need to deal with the underlying societal causes of despair.
> These are all unintended consequences of poorly conceived policy making.
You're right. For instance, one terribly conceived policy is policing this problem and spending millions of dollars to lock up people in jails and prisons for this instead of just spending money on socialized subsidized housing.
A social safety net from housing to universal basic income will dramatically reduce the problems in questions.
But even in the most progressive cities of North America, this is just not on the table. And instead when people speak about "bad policy" what they're really saying is "I want to see MORE police".
People elect the government they deserve.
Edit: This is a situation with most metro areas. Definitely with Chicago where there is a large contingent of folks who commute from the suburbs.
It's possible for harmful but popular policy to go forward with no one but your average constituent to blame, but when every option is a different set of false promises and failures to execute, and "the discourse" is driven mostly by dollar-driven propagandists, it's hard to place the blame for dysfunctional government on voters generally.
It's possible for harmful but popular policy to go forward with no one but your average constituent to blame, but when every option is a different set of false promises and failures to execute, and "the discourse" is driven mostly by dollar-driven propagandists, it's hard to place the blame for disfunctional government on voters generally.
What you're experiencing is confirmation bias. You read about one crime, then started noticing all of the stories about crime, formed a theory based on this hyper focusing, and now you believe it's worse than ever despite the stats clearly showing otherwise.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
If you are a resident, you very well know that a huge portion of crimes, violent or not, are not being reported because of the end result. Property crime is through the roof. My car has been broken into 3 times in the last year or so. Before that, I've only had my car broken into once in a decade before. I've had to call the police 3-4 times (apart from the car break ins) in the last 2 years for individuals in crisis, sometimes threatening violence. I never had to do it in the decade before. In fact, the first time I had to do it, I wasn't sure if I call 911 and had to look up the non emergency line. Yes, all of this is anecdotal or "personal experience", but talking to everyone I know around me, all of their "personal experiences" have only gotten worse recently. Which makes me believe that at this point, the data paints as accurate picture as anecdotes these days.
Exactly. The whole "crime is terrible in SF" is just a Republican propaganda narrative that people who should know better are buying into.
Same shit in SF, Portland, Seattle, and even Vancouver CA!
It's a PNW problem. We are simply too libertarian and hate cops too much. Everyone else in this thread thinks it's something else. It's not. People here fucking hate cops and will turn society to anarchy to be rid of them.
Its tough to balance reading https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che... that kinda shows crime is average for a large US city with the Bell Riots in the DS9 storyline https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots as an outsider.
Either way, shouldn't San Fran have plenty of money from all the tech there and plenty of extra office real estate from covid to try and put a dent in all the circumstances that lead up to someone needing to steal or getting addicted to drugs? Probably too optimistic of a take ...
Incidents are actual reports to police, not a log of all activities happening in the city. Several factors can influence reporting rates in a city, causing over or underreporting. Especially if you doubt the effectiveness and corruptibility of the police. Homicides are direct reports of victims and more accurate.
Plus, the linked article is based on the San Francisco Police Department website's crime data. Not saying that nefarious activity is the case, but has this data been audited by a 3rd party? There's definitely an incentive to show that things are better than they are if funding, elections, etc. depend on it.
Deleted Comment
SF is especially "bad" because it has an incredibly high cost-of-living. If you're living in the area without a high-paying (tech) job, you're very likely to be only one or two surprises away from losing your housing.
Due to the very real issue of police brutality in SFPD, local politicians are opposed to increasing funding for SFPD without oversight, and a number of politicians want to decrease it due to their police brutality record.
That said, SFPD is having a hard time retaining and hiring officers as they can get better salaries elsewhere in the Bay with less overtime. Fresh out of Academy cops in San Jose can earn a $111k base that caps at $189k, but SFPD's starting base is $103k and caps at $147.5k. Even factoring overtime, SFPD comes out to less than SJPD for hours worked, and other richer suburbs can pay even more than either wth even less hours.
Add to that politicization of the SF DA's office and Public Defender's office for the exact same reason (pay sucks so political hacks from both sides of the aisle fight for control) and you have dysfunctional local law enforcement.
On top of all that, SF had massively redeveloped a lot of formerly redlined neighborhoods (Western Addition/Hayes Valley, Mid-Market/Civic Center, Mission Bay+Potrero/Hunters Point) which in turn displaced those who couldn't afford to move to cheaper working class suburbs like Antioch and Vallejo.
Add to that the very real issue of neighboring states and cities (both Republican like Nevada in the 2010s and Democrat like NYC in the late 2010s to present) bussing their basket case issues out to San Francisco.
All this lead to the dysfunction that is seen today in San Francisco.
SF has very high property and overall crime rates. This is objective fact. It has the 4th highest property crime rate in the country, and the 7th highest overall crime rate in the country[1][2].
However, the _violent_ crime rate is only slightly above average in SF. Some people don't care much about the rampant theft; they still feel safe.
The same is true of e.g. the homelessness and drug issues. There are objectively more homeless people & drug addicts laying out on the sidewalks in SF. Some people don't care, some people are really bothered by this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[2] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#des...
SF has reached a tipping point and the wildly inflated values of multi-million dollar condos and trophy commercial buildings are falling fall enough to start putting serious wealth at risk.
No one likes walking down the street and seeing a guy yelling incoherently at passing cars, or getting on a subway car and finding someone sprawled across one of the benches smelling like shit.
On the other side you have idealistic liberals who want to solve the problem by adding more social services but taking no further action.
This is likely a problem created by extreme wealth inequality and the fix is probably not what the posters on this site would be interested in entertaining.
1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up.
2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared.
It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it.
3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
No, the statistics show that reports to the police are going down. The reports are NOT going down because crime is going down; they are going down because victims are less and less likely to report the crimes.
For example, the Whole Foods that shut down in the gentrified area around 9th street is a couple blocks from Hyde & Turk - which is the main drug market in the city.
The high rises along 5th Street near Moscone are adjacent to the SROs and homeless shelters on 6th.
Similar stuff in Mission District and Polk Street/Lower Nob Hill as well - a lot of older SROs/cheap apartments got converted into Hotels, Airbnbs, or resold as condos.
And despite all this, no one noticed the intergenerational poverty and gun crime in the Projects in Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley because they are cut off from the rest of the city.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed at by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
probably the very best place in SF is the corner of Broadway and Broderick...still within half a mile of a tent camp
SF will probably never be "solved"
people have been trying to "solve" SF since the 90s, it has only become worse every year
SF has to hit total Haiti-grade rock-bottom before it can be repaired, maybe in five years
until then, just go somewhere else and live your life