There is no tl;dr for crime, society, and geography. Even if there were I think San Francisco would still be an outlier. Regardless, arrests and incidence of crime are separate things. Making it easier to look at data is certainly useful and thanks for helping in that respect, but that doesn't provide answers on its own.
As a former crime reporter, I just have to chime in and say that not all crime statistics are created equal. For example, when I was building a crime map for my region, some large departments provided no data, which made their areas look rather safe in comparison.
There is no universal standard for granularity. Or even classification (even if jurisdictions are within the same state).
This is less of a problem if you are only focusing on SF as I think there is only one jurisdiction there (SF police), but something to keep in mind when trying to make comparisons with SF to anywhere else in the Bay Area.
Also, in any urban area, extremely violent crime is most heavily centered on drug-related incidents (a drug dealer collecting, for example). Not all (or even most) of these crimes happen across a random distribution of the population.
The crime rate in SF does seem high, but I have a few issues here:
> When you do the math, the incidents of all types per square mile in San Francisco is by far and away the highest in the country with zero comparison
Well yes, because crime rates are a product of population not land area. It should not be surprising that SF with a population of 874k in 49 square miles has more crime per square mile than, say Charlotte 873k in 309 square miles.
I am not saying crime is low in SF, I'm saying "I don't like this relevant comparison so I will use this other one" isn't super helpful.
> If San Francisco were as large as Atlanta, Chicago, etc. its stats would reveal a completely different story.
Yes, because the population if it were the size of Atlanta it would have 2.4 million people, e.g. almost five times the population.
> Most of the victims are innocent civilians. Just watch the news
What are the actual statistics here - I could believe this claim, but citing the news isn't relevant because its biased in favor of reporting crime against civilians (man bites dog vs dog bites man).
> Lastly, San Francisco has decriminalized so many things that used to be crimes that now, magically, they no longer show up in the statistics
I agree with this statement. The crime rates in the Castro would be much higher if we hadn't decriminalized homosexuality. Crime rates in the mission would be much higher if weed remained illegal. Of course, you'd also gets spikes in crime rates if you made it illegal to have unoccupied residential property, or made labor code violations criminal rather than civil code violations.
I get that this guy's friend has been murdered but to pretend the issue is that crimes statistics lie isn't going to stop it happening. It seems much more likely to me that the core issue is that the typical divide in US cities between affluent areas and poor areas does not exist in SF, and by proxy the gap between high and low crime regions doesn't exist. I'm sure plenty of people in plenty of cities have areas they don't walk through but SF makes that impossible.
Good points. I don’t know of anyone has done the kind of deep analysis they’re advocating for though.
As a broad brush, I still think it’s fair to say in 2019 SF was around the middle of the pack for the top 100 cities in terms of reported crime per 100k known people.
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.
I didn't say there was nothing wrong with crime in SF. I just shared a link showing (just as your does) that its crime rate is significantly lower than a lot of cities.
For some reason a certain segment of the national media and populace is always talking about the San Francisco crime rate but seemingly never covers stories about crime in Phoenix, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas, or Indianapolis.
Robberies SF - 344 per 100K. Lafayette 11 per 100K.
You are 31!! times more likely to be robbed in a day in SF than in Lafayette. This assumes reporting is equal - in general studies show once crime is up reporting goes WAY down.
The difference in crime rates between urban and suburban is relatively well known. I also linked to articles discussing increase in murder in SF.
Is there something more you want?
Is the question about year over year crime in SF itself?
It's odd that the article avoids the question of where crime occurs in the city, as that might provide some answers. A few months ago I made many data visualizations of where criminal arrests occur in San Francisco: http://minimaxir.com/2015/12/sf-arrest-maps/
The tl;dr is that, as expected, SF crime is centralized in the Tenderloin, with 16th St Mission being a close second. However, as the years progressed, crime has become relatively less centralized around those areas. (there wasn't much activity on Lombard Street, though.)
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.
> San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18. Within California, more than 98% of the communities have a lower crime rate than San Francisco.
Per square mile is not useful. Crime rates are related to people. People commit crimes, not land. This is a made up statistic whose only useful purpose is to make San Francisco go to the top of a list it otherwise would not. It's why crimes are reported per capita
You’re comparing SF, a major city, to Lafayette, a suburb. That is objectively a ridiculous comparison. You will see similar disparities in most comparisons of that nature.
Your only SF specific crime stat is about property crime (shoplifting). Consistent with what I wrote.
Your second stat on murders is regional, not specific to SF, which overall remains near all time lows in violent crime. You then blame the regional Bay Area rise on SF’s district attorney which makes no sense.
This is all consistent with what I’m saying: the “safety” claims are not supported by data. Some folks in the tech community just keep saying it over and over within a specific sphere but I’m calling B.S. SF is safer than it’s been for most of our lives.
San Francisco has a higher incidence of violent crime per capita than does New York, despite the fact that San Francisco is concentrated into 46 square miles, while New York spans 301 square miles.
What this means in practice is that nobody in San Francisco lives more than walking distance from an area of the city in which people are routinely mugged, whereas you have to get north of the 140s in NYC to see drastically increased crime.
San Francisco is, for its population, anomalously small. That plays into a lot of the problems perceive in it: it drives housing costs, makes transportation infrastructure harder to build, retards home ownership (and thus neighborhoods --- had a block party lately?), puts people into closer contact with crime, &c &c.
I lived in SF for several years, and I think 'potatolicious is if anything understating his case.
I should add that I am not a US citizen nor I live in the US. I live in a 10 million inhabitants south American capital, where Tv reports on crimes of all sorts committed every day. I, however, have not been robbed in the last twenty five years. Sometimes personal experiences do not reflect geography and statistics.
The problem with bias is that it generally feels normal, and so without some substantial degree of introspection, you might see everybody else as being biased, while assuming your own views are the truly correct ones. Try to read what you're writing as if somebody else wrote it, and you don't really have any opinion on this issue.
You're talking about a city with the 2nd highest theft rate, the overall 4th highest property crime rate, and comparing it against cities that not only have much lower crime rates, but ones where the clearance rate is at least twice as high for the crimes that are committed. Then there are other probable issues, but ones seemingly neither of us has been able to dig up data on, like prosecution rates vs dismissal/reclassification. To claim these differences amount to nothing, or only exist due to bias in others, is just not really reasonable.
You can accept San Francisco having a high crime rate, but think that the other niceties you enjoy about the city more than compensate for it. Every city, every state, every country has its own set of pros and cons. It's only balance that the 'big picture' really comes out, and that's also going to be extremely subjective.
At least based on that data set (and it's easy to find disagreeing data sets), murders are actually below average.
But the problem is: There isn't a definitive data source. The FBIs UCR[1] is closest, but because they split by agency, it's hard to find relevant geographic data. For SF, you're looking at BART Alamenda, BART Contra Costa, SF County Highway Patrol, BART SF, SF Sheriff's office, SFPD, SF State University,Union Pacific Railroad, UCLA SF, San Mateo BART, South SF PD, Santa Clara BART. (If the US stopped encouraging everybody to play cops and robbers on their own, that'd be nice)
But even if you settle for one of them, data is only reported up to 2021, and that means graphs stop at 2020. It's almost as if there was profit in making current crime a matter of opinion instead of facts.But for the data set? Violent crime is down.
Turns out, homicide is pretty much stable over the last decade. Same for aggravated assault.Rape is down to 2010 levels again. Robbery is down. None of the numbers are significantly up.
This might be more dangerous than other cities, but it's at current levels for a long while now.
Your source seems to say SF is #37 of 100, when sorted by crime per population.
Large cities with crime rate higher than SF, according to your source: Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix.
Your source says St Louis has a crime rate 2.9x higher.
Maybe consider that you just hate SF, for your own personal reasons?
(And your source is based on voluntary reporting, so there's huge biases there. SF sounds like the kind of place that could manage to push for more transparency..)
You've repeatedly fallen back to a wider position; you're not giving "concrete examples." You're blowing the discussion out of scope (trying to drag in something happening 6000 miles away with a totally different context) -- crime in San Francisco is not closely related to cultural differences, self- and by-policy segregation, and fear of policing/censorship happening in Europe.
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