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."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...