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It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.

I lived in SF for ~15 years, experienced multiple car breakins (when I had a car) and one weird guy who walked up to me on the street and said "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" (which I somehow calmly ignored). For the record, I didn't comment in that thread and I generally don't feel the need to bash SF in public - I just simply moved out.




The only thing I'm "championing" (just pointing out, really) is that certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities, despite all available data contradicting that worldview.

I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.


On the other hand, I feel like it takes an incredibly public tragedy for a platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.

People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.

> quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities

I don't see why speaking out about lack of police enforcement is seen as 'quasi-apocalyptic'.

> despite all available data contradicting that worldview

All available data is in favor of those speaking out about crime & drugs in west coast cities. Additionally, the eye test seems to portray a situation that's more dire than even the data might suggest. (underreporting, catch & release).


> People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.

Indeed, because that's not what this forum is for. There's ten thousand fora online for general, local, or city-policy political discussion; those topics are only germane in this forum when they relate to tech or the processes of tech.


Because HN is a technology discussion board with a worldwide audience, not a local politics one. YCombinator isn't even based in SF.

When the CEO of YCombinator blocks people on Twitter for disagreeing with him online on SF politics[0], it tells me I don't want HN to be a haven for that.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125


FWIW, he mass blocks people who have _never_ interacted with him on twitter. If you happen to like a tweet from an account that he doesn't like, you're blocked!

I get that people need to protect their feeds for their mental health, but I'd expect a public figure to have thicker skin and not default to hitting the scorched-earth-mega-auto-block button so often.


I wouldn't really take who YCombinator execs have blocked with much of an indication of anything. It's a badge of honor to be blocked by Paul Graham over something silly and petty.


It's indicative of the exec's desire to actually engage on a topic with people who might disagree with them. That's a big issue with how much control they can potentially exert on this site.


I'm referring to blocking people specifically over SF politics, as per his own comment, linked to above.


> platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.

I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.

I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"

EDIT: Just to cite my sources: [0] shows 397k registered cars in SF [1] shows 810k residents.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-research-reports/research-...

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...


Just to reinforce what you say here

> I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.

As a European on this platform it's ceaseless whinging about the state of SF and how the "woke mob" are ruining San Francisco and the state of the Tenderloin versus Mission or Market or whatever and I don't particularly care to know.

Like I've started to learn the parts of a city I have no particular interest in visiting from repeated stories about how someone shouted and pooped in the street because of boogeyman de jour.

Definitely feels like maybe YC could make a "local HN" to save the rest of us from these circular discussions.


I appreciate you saying so. As a 20-year SF resident I wondered if it was just confirmation bias making me think those topics/views were incredibly common. But it's at the point where I'd almost rather deal with Bitcoin boosters.


Yes, it's common for one and the same topic to be perceived as both hideously overrepresented and hideously underrepresented on HN.

Even the very most popular stories get perceived as being suppressed—for a striking example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35296170.


>I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"

Hmm, the vast majority of tourists in Orlando aren't Orlando residents, but if I got murdered back in my hotel on a Disneyworld trip, I would hope they'd be willing to at least poke into it.


Again, I agree murders are important to discuss, but it is not a good idea to talk about smash and grabs like they are murders.


18% of that 810k is under 18.

397k for 664k adults means a 59.8% car ownership rate.


I think it is important to note that police do not only protect adult residents.


You must have some filter on. There are literally thousands of HN posts in the last few years about housing and crime and hundreds of which devolved into the dystopian hellhole memes endemic in the HN ideosphere.

The quickest path to karma at HN is to post anything about BA housing.


Crime - and SF crime specifically - frequently gets discussed on HN when crime-related stories make it to the front page. You're not paying attention if you think the site has a zero-tolerance policy for it.


What does "SF crime" have to do with the content that is expected on hackernews?


Someone saying that the have a gun and are going to shoot you is very clearly assault, which is a criminal act. It would generally quality as a violent crime in statistics (if SFPD took reports of threats of violence, which they will not).

While we should use data, we should also understand where there may be issues with the data that we're using.


The gist of your point is 100% correct. I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.

> Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.

Calmly ignoring the threat is evidence that the person was not "in immediate apprehension of such a contact".

I only bring this up because i think it's interesting, and the underlying point you are making is 100% correct. This kind of thing is not normal nor innocent and not to be tolerated.


Oh, I was definitely apprehensive of imminent harm.

More details: Fairly normal-looking dude walked up next to me and kept pace for a couple minutes, threatening me and calling me "faggot" (which seemed odd, since I was walking with my girlfriend at the time). I didn't see an actual gun so I figured that the safest course of action was to simply ignore him until he presented more of a threat or walked away. I guess I bored him so he walked away.

The calm took some willpower.


For sure. I didn't mean to derail the thread or tell you how you feel, just share what I think is an interesting aspect of assault as defined in common law. But your subjective experience here is exactly what the law means to recognize with assault and sounds like it was assault. But who knows. Glad the situation fizzled out (usually best case scenario)


> I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.

This is actually an interesting point of semantics to me. I guess it'd really hinge on how you define "calmly" here - if you saw me walking my dog while a homeless person screamed that he was going to kill me, I would certainly appear calm. Even internally, I suspect my heart rate would increase but not enormously. Still, I would be very alert and mentally prepared for the possibility that this person is going to attack me, because I very much believe that to be possible. Given that, I would say that I have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harm (and I expect a lot of San Franciscans are similar in that regard).


It's a reasonable belief and fear that person will carry out the act. You are probably misinterpreting the reasonable part, especially when people mask their reaction to try to get away or out of shock / instinct. The person making the threats probably gets enjoyment from getting a rise out of random strangers. Also, returning to the original context, there are too many people on the street that have severe mental health crises going on and are freely roaming some cities. They don't necessarily need to go to be convicted of a crime as a solution.


We should also take practical steps to increase your chances of survival, which, if someone says this to you:

- Keep an eye on their hands.

- Attempt to de-escalate the person.

- If they brandish a weapon in extreme close proximity to yourself, use both your hands to firmly grab onto the hand/wrist that's holding the weapon and extend your arms fully (using your skeleton to maintain that distance and provide added strength). Your focus should be on controlling that hand so they don't stab or shoot you. Yes, you may incur injury regardless, this is what's colloquially known as a "shit sandwich".

- Increase distance and vacate the area as soon as possible. If they have a gun, run in a zig zag pattern and seek cover (blocks bullets) or concealment (hides you, but doesn't stop bullets).

- Once you are safe, then report the incident to law enforcement (if they'll do anything).


You mean well, but this is Hollywood-grade advice for close quarters encounters.

Arms extended gives you the least possible leverage. Like when cops in movies run around with gun drawn at arms' length (the Weaver stance is for target shooting). To disarm a gun-wielding opponent, you want to get in close, grab the weapon from both sides securely (hug it) and do a dead drop. Unless you're fighting The Rock, they can't hold both you and the weapon. Unless you are The Rock, you'll probably get killed grappling with them any other way.

Don't do this for knives. Just stay the length of two arms + 1 beer bottle away from them.

I don't have any advice for swords but anyone who comes at you with one isn't playing by conventional rules, so run like hell.

The zig zag thing is a myth. It works in Counter-Strike, but you'll just end up dying an embarrassing death in reality. The only zig zagging you should be doing is from cover to cover. Get to cover as directly as possible. This isn't The OA...interpretive dance won't save you.

PROTIP: As cover goes, cars are made of the same stuff as beer cans and glass. The IC engine block is the only part that will actually stop a bullet. EVs are explosive.


I can't imagine you live in SF, because this is just bad advice.

You don't attempt to de-escalate. You completely ignore. You do not try to grab their wrist. If they brandish a weapon, you run.

You don't report the incident to law enforcement, because they do not care and will do nothing.


And depending on the DA you’ll be thrown in jail if you defend yourself.


By "certain populations" do you mean a small selection of the worst members of almost all populations?

Jumping to conclusions and pushing narratives isn't the exclusive purview of any particular group, especially not in 2023.


> certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities

For those interested in the topic, I recommend Loewen's "Sundown Towns". My copy's on loan, but I think it's in Ch 11, "The Effects of Sundown Towns on Whites" that he talks about the culture among descendants of white-flight suburbanites, their low-to-no-experience views on the horrors of the city, where Those People run rampant. Many are terrified of even going to cities. To people who actually live in the cities, their view is almost unrecognizable.

As an example from something in my feed reader today [1], take Theo Wold, a former Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy (under Trump) and current Idaho Solicitor General. He quote-tweeted a photo of a white woman hugging two Black men. They were the Tennessee Three, the state legislators who were under threat of expulsion for protest.

His comment: "Every Red State will have to wrestle with the fetid, urban Leftist vote sinks. That begins with asking the question: why does the GOP continue to push the annexation/development of rural land that only grows the size and power of Leftist strongholds?"

Fetid stronghold sinks! Sounds pretty bad. In our favor, at least we have taco trucks on every corner.

It reminds me of nothing so much as this bit from Chairman Mao: "It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres and other people in the cities should be persuaded to send their sons and daughters who have completed junior or senior middle school, college or university, to the countryside. Let us mobilize."

[1] https://balloon-juice.com/2023/04/13/late-night-open-thread-...


Considering that a large population of sf tech is migrants, many people, myself included, compare it not to other American cities but to European and Asian ones.

I would say that the comparison is apt - since we compare the tech/science successes of SF with the rest of the world, we should also compare the crime rates with it.


I didn't like the direction of this comment. All cities are good and bad in their own way for the people that live there.


It might be helpful for you to take a class on gun safety to reduce the anxiety you have about seeing guns. Remember, the police also open carry because peaceful open carry is primarily about deterrence.

Brandishing a weapon is legally different from open carry, and is already a crime. Brandishing means to draw or exhibit the weapon in a threatening manner, or to use it in a fight, other than in lawful self-defense.


What an absolutely asinine thing to champion. How does that do any good to actually help with "policy" as your initial comment seems to intend? All you seem to be doing is acting like "I'm smarter than all of you!"

SF is a dangerous city. That seems to be the main point of concern here.


Well if we’re inventing types of danger out of whole cloth and proposing solutions to them they probably won’t help with anything. We also should probably quantify what “dangerous” means if, as both that post and the article say, violent crime in San Francisco is actually exceptionally low.


No one is denying crime is a problem. The point is that people were quick attribute this tragedy to yet another unprovoked attack, which turned out to be false. But it fit the narrative, so it was believed to be true.


It's not just this tragedy, it's any tragedy. Every time there's a mass shooting, people use it as a rallying cry for more gun control, rather than focusing on fixing the issues that actually led to the violence (usually severe mental health issues), as if people haven't used knives or vehicles to commit mass murder/violence. Never let a good tragedy go to waste, so the saying goes.


A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife. Seems like it's always a gun. Probably because a gun makes it really easy to kill people quickly.


I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife

Guns are clearly more deadly than knives, so I am not intending to equate them, but mass casualty knife attacks also happen.

10 dead, 15 hospitalized in Canada mass stabbing attacks, police say:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-stabbing-saskatchewan-de...

Six people were killed and 14 injured after a knife-wielding man stabbed passersby on a pedestrian shopping street in the eastern Chinese city of Anqing:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/china/china-knife-attacks-mic...

At least 15 killed, dozens injured in knifing near Tokyo

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/nation-world/2016/07...


I don't consider two of those to be good comparisons to mass shootings of the "kill dozens of people in a couple minutes" variety.

The Saskatchewan stabbings were attacks at 13 separate locations across a sparsely populated reservation rather than a single mass casualty event.

The Sagamihara stabbings were attacks on sleeping disabled patients inside a care home. It reminds me more of Angel of Death type mass killings (by nurses / doctors). He considered it to be euthanasia and the weapon could have been a pillow - the mass killing was not down to the deadliness of the weapon but the passivity of the victims.

The Anqing attack is a better example - a single event against conscious victims. Nevertheless, mass stabbings across the whole globe are rarer than the daily mass shootings in the US.


The person you replied to said

"A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife.

The Canadian incident took place over days and 13 different locations. The other two incidents don't say how long they took but it just takes way longer to kill people with a knife than a gun.


> usually severe mental health issues

Do you have a citation on that?

I am not fully researched on this topic, but as a lay observer it appear that the gun rights side basically categorizes anyone who is willing to commit a mass shooting as mentally ill, and hence every mass shooting is a result of mental illness by definition. But it does not follow that mass shooters are mentally ill by any professional standards.


> Every time there's a mass shooting [...]

If this is a valid premise, then you know you are doing something wrong as a society. Mass shootings are common place in the US (with currently 177 mass shootings this year so far). This is not normal.


It depends entirely on the definition of mass shooting.

If you use the FBI's active shooting definition, there's closer to 15-20 per year on a 20 year average.

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents...

If you use the GVA definition, which includes a whole lot of other things, then yes. But the GVA's dataset is somewhat suspect.

For example this qualifies as a mass shooting in the GVA:

https://www.atlantapd.org/Home/Components/News/News/4031/631


US isn't even close to the top of the list for mass shootings in the world and it is not "common place". Most "mass" shootings, which could be just three individuals, are gang related and added to the data for mass shootings.


Not even three. GVA includes a lot of incidents with just two individuals being shot, so long as at least two other people are present for the incident.


It’s actually nothing like that at all. People keep bringing it up because the US has the second highest number of gun related deaths of any country in the entire world.


hermitdev claimed that if guns weren't available, people would use knives or cars instead. So the fact that gun related deaths are higher in the US is irrelevant. And they do have a point: knife murders are more common in Europe than they are in the US.

But not by much. The fact that the murder rate in the US is 7X the murder rate in Europe is a much more relevant statistic.


The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.

There is not any evidence what so ever that a person who might commit a murder with a gun would just use the next available option to them such as a knife. That was something that was just introduced to the discussion as a fact when in reality it’s something you have made up.

In fact it’s immediately clear that to most people they are two very different things precisely because one of them is literally just pushing a button.

There is a reason why the murder rate is 7x higher because the access to guns requires a much lower buy in to commit the act in the first place.

Hence why people argue for stricter gun control laws. Mass access is precisely the problem.


so you think these gangs are just going to not kill people anymore because all guns magically disappeared?

you do know when they don't have access to guns in prison they then shank people with whatever they can sharpen, right?


There's much less opportunity to attack someone with a knife and it involves a lot more personal risk. You're likely to get stabbed back unless they're totally unprepared. It's much more difficult to do a "drive by knifing".


It's also a lot harder to defend yourself without a gun.

Especially if you're physically weaker.


You are responding to a claim that nobody made and then introducing another “fact” that isn’t actually relevant to the conversation.

The argument isn’t that all murder stops. It’s that it goes down, dramatically when you remove guns from the equation.


1. You can't remove all guns, you can only remove the legal ones.

2. If you had the ability to remove illegal guns from society you would have had the ability to remove the criminals in the first place.

3. Even if you did remove the millions of guns and prevent manufacturing / imports (even though you can't for drugs) you don't know for certain murders will go down. These people are ruthless. Jumping people with machetes is always an option. It may be worse since guns are an equalizer and let people defend themselves. You're a lot less likely to run up on someone when you know they have a gun.


> The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.

What point do you think I'm making? Because I think you're trying to reiterate the same point.


~25% of the murders in the US are already committed without guns, so even if you removed gun crime outright and no one decided to commit the same crime with a different weapon, the US would still have ~2x the murder rate of Europe. Not that this is a case against gun control, as we're still (very theoretically) saving ~15,000 lives a year. But it does suggest that there is a cause for the differing rates that is not related to guns.


Sources please. This reads like a NRA ad full of lies.


Here's the murder weapon statistics for 2019 from the FBI[1]. This only includes homicides for which the weapon is known. We'll assume that the rest match the distribution, though I suspect if you can't identify the weapon, there probably aren't bullet holes.

Summing total homicides gives 13,927. Summing total firearm homicides gives 10,258. 10,258/13,927 = 77.15%. I admit I did not do initially do that work and instead summed percentages from this infographic[2], arriving at 26.3% non-firearm homicide. I can't explain the discrepancy, as they point to the same data. The total homicide count is 5 higher on the FBI site, so possibly the page was updated later on. I point this out to clarify that I rounded the percentage down, which is why I felt comfortable with .25 * 7 ~= 2, though the answer with the new percentage is 1.59. I'd round to 1.5 if I did it again.

If you want a source for Europe's homicide rate being 1/7 that of the US, you'll have to ask the person I was replying to. Wikipedia[3] says Europe's murder rate is 3.0 and the US is 6.5, but I expect the person here was restricting it to the EU or something else along those lines (also various sources differ, and it's something that changes over time). I don't think the restriction changes either of our points, as long as the 7x number does really exist.

I can't recall ever having seen an NRA ad but I don't imagine my comment sounds anything like one. If the NRA really does say in their ads that they're not making a case against gun control and that it could save 15,000 lives a year, I don't have a problem sounding like them.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://infographicjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/we...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...


FBI:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

It's about 28-35% of homicides without guns


(note you may also be interested to learn from that table that knives are used ~5x more frequently than all rifles in homicide)


It's a lot harder to murder a large number of people with a knife than a gun.


what about a van? and there's been plenty of mass stabbings.

focus on getting rid of gangs, your gun murder rate will plummet.

noone seems to care about the 20-60 shootings per day in gun-free Chicago.

all of those criminals don't seem to respect the gun laws...

the only thing that happens when you restrict guns in the US is you take away the ability for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves.


And yet… there’s no vehicular homicide crime wave but 8/10 murders in the country involve a gun https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...


"Where effective tool is available it's used"

Isn't really the gotcha you might think.

We know who uses guns to kill people, we know who they kill. You don't see those on the news because no one wants to talk about it.

Of the 10,000 murders or so per year with firearms, over 66% are drug and gang related.


We both understand the concept that the US has more than 1 major social problem at the same time right and that other countries also have comparable levels of gang membership but wildly different murder rates.


So everyone who is currently killing each other with guns will see their enemy gang in the street and not decide to slash them because they are too lazy? They only wanted to shoot them?

It's the type of gangs in America, it's not about "gang membership" or whatever metric you're trying to throw out.

They shank people with tooth brushes in prison. MS-13 decapitates people with axes. It's the gangs, not the guns.

Chicago and many cities in America would be safer with more legal guns, less gangsters.


It’s really difficult to pretend this is a serious comment.

It’s just so all over the place responding to arguments that no one ever made with a series of facts you seem to have taken from who knows where.


There's a lot of fascist-apologists on this site. It's truly bizarre.


Everyone who doesn't agree with me is a fascist!

I think you may want to look at history who confiscates guns.


Interesting, I feel the same to you.


How would Chicago be safer with more guns? Please explain this logic.


And yet the US is the only place where mass shootings resulting in 5+ deaths regularly happen.


The problem with saying that SF has relatively low violent crime is that it ignores the constant, extremely aggressive verbal assault that people are just accustomed to. In the years I lived there, I had people scream at me that they were going to kill/stab/etc. me at least a couple of dozen times (I would describe this as violent crime). Of course, if you call SFPD, they'll just tell you it's not an issue and ignore you, so those don't go into any statistics.


You're right, "violent crime" is a term of art that involves the commission of a…crime. "Verbal assault" is not assault. I guess if you don't like the vibes in a place, you can go somewhere else, but trying to use such things to influence how people talk about or perceive actual, no, for real crime is intellectual malpractice.


You've got a really weird black and white view of these things. As long as people aren't literally murdering you then it's ok? The idea that "real crime" only happens AFTER the actual crime has taken place is super bizarre. That's not how the world works.

Go find me a city that has people that are super happy and nice to each other and also has a high murder rate. Wait, I bet you can't.

Talking about the petty crime and the "vibe" is absolutely on topic for this, because that sort of laissez-faire attitude leads to murders like the one we're discussing.


>Talking about the petty crime and the "vibe" is absolutely on topic for this, because that sort of laissez-faire attitude leads to murders like the one we're discussing.

... you mean the murder in question that, as we've found out in this article/thread, has nothing to do with the "petty crime" and "vibe" that you're referring to?


Still seems like a good opportunity to me to bring up the general "whatever" nature in SF regarding crime. Perhaps this stabbing took place because the assailant felt more brazen knowing that the police in that city won't do anything?

Let's just let the homeless and the mentally deranged do whatever they want in SF. That's definitely a good way to run a modern city. Better than hurting their feelings! /s


>Let's just let the homeless and the mentally deranged do whatever they want in SF. That's definitely a good way to run a modern city. Better than hurting their feelings! /s

If that's the takeaway you're getting from this comment chain, I really don't know what else to tell you.


> The idea that "real crime" only happens AFTER the actual crime has taken place is super bizarre.

Huh? A crime must take place for... a crime to have taken place. It's tautological.

Threatening people is not usually a crime, but that depends. If it's a problem in SF, they could probably make it a crime.


> Go find me a city that has people that are super happy and nice to each other and also has a high murder rate. Wait, I bet you can't.

Many Mexican and Brazilian cities have much higher murder rates and people are still generally happier and nicer than in the US, especially if SF is the basis for comparison.


Your comments are disingenuous. A decline in the quality of life in a city due to crime, substance abuse, homelessness and untreated mental health disorders has an immense affect on one’s well being. That goes doubly so for people with spouses and children.

If you are confronted by a mentally ill person screaming threats at you, is your first thought to seek comfort in the violent crime stats? You must be some kind of robot, if so.


Threatening to assault someone is, in fact, a real crime. You cannot, legally, go around "screaming that you're going to kill/stab/etc." people. Looks like Penal Code 422, if you need a concrete reference for California specifically


Menacing/verbal threats/criminal threats are a real crime in most places including California.


The problem is you actually don't understand what assault is. Assault does not involving actually touching someone - that's battery. What you're describing as verbal assault is actually assault and is a real crime, generally considered to be violent crime in crime statistics.


We should convince the SF tourism board to use this motto. Come to San Francisco, where our vibe is constant threats of murder but you probably won't actually get murdered!


Just to offer a counter-anecdote: In 8 years of living in SOMA, which has the 2nd highest crime rate after Tenderloin, nobody has even once threatened to kill me. Or even hinted at wanting me harm.

Property crime is a different story. That has indeed been a problem.


Why even offer a counter-anecdote? Are you trying to give the impression to impressionable people that not every person gets threatened with murder on a regular basis here? That’s true, but it seems like you’re just trying to discount one person’s lived experience. I know women that get groped on MUNI regularly but not every woman gets groped on MUNI. People don’t usually threaten me, but I’ve stopped people from threatening others in front of me. Hell, I’ve stopped a guy from trying to roll another guy sleeping on the street into oncoming traffic. Nobody has ever stolen my phone from me, but that doesn’t mean phones have never been stolen from people.

And before you go to the stats, just remember something: lies, damned lies and statistics. If the police don’t get involved, there’s no police report. If the DA doesn’t charge a crime, there’s no “crime” even if there actually is. Homicides and property crimes tend to leave the most evidence behind, but those aren’t the only crimes that matter and even the criminal amounts of piss and shit around just the MUNI and BART stations probably isn’t generating any police reports either. Verbal harassment and threats also don’t tend to generate enough of the right kind of paperwork to make it into the stats, but it doesn’t make it less real.


> Why even offer a counter-anecdote?

To say that “constant threats of murder” does not accurately describe SF.


Against a deliberately facetious post someone made that was a follow-on to a follow-on of somebody else’s anecdote?

Let me put it this way: needing to counter an anecdote with your own comes across as unsympathetic at worst and apathetic at best. “Yeah that happened to you, so what? It doesn’t happen to me!” kinda vibes.

It happens enough that too many people have these stories about San Francisco. They’re the kinds of things that can happen anywhere, but San Francisco is one of the places where it is talked about as happening a lot.


You are right.

I think what gets me is the underlying classism that oozes out of these conversations everywhere I turn. People here (in SFBA) are oh so liberal and progressive ... as long as the undesirables aren't in _their_ neighborhood. Then suddenly everyone's pearl clutching.

For the most part they mean you no harm. Just because people are poor, doesn't mean they're dangerous.

One of the dumbest examples was when a neighbor asked me to stop putting cardboard boxes in recycling because "it attracts the bad element and then they camp in our street". Ffs man they're homeless, let them have a damn box.


The homeless people you're advocating for are the worst victims of the homeless people being criticized in this thread. You do no favors for people who happen to be poor by providing cover for the crazies.

If there were more being done about the people threatening violence, intentionally urinating on passersby, molesting women, accosting people in the streets, your neighbor would likely be less concerned about the cardboard box people.


My first time in SOMA I had a homeless guy almost piss on my shoes followed by another guy shadow-stabbing with a real knife and pointing at me. Let's call it a mulligan.


[flagged]


Which “tough” practices do police need access to? Extrajudicial beatings and murder? Torture? Tell us please, don’t hide behind euphemism.


How about arresting them for the crimes they commit. That's more than enough.


> Couple that with police not really being able to be tough on degenerate hood youths and voila

Police should terrorize anyone you don't like. Awesome system you're proposing.


You're wrong. Verbal assault is assault, and is violence, because it leads to the reasonable expectation of violence. You don't know if the crazy person threatening to kill you will actually try to do it so you have to imagine that they will.

--

Sorry Dang, you're right.


You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment and have been breaking them in other places too. We ban accounts that post like this, so would you please stop?

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


You just learn to tune it out. Crazy people gonna crazy. It's like the announcements that come over the PA at airports for "Please report any unattended baggage - if you see something, say something", or 99% of what the news media writes, or Putin's threats to nuke the West, or the breathless pitches of startup founders that they're going to change the world.


You just extrapolated that narrative up in your head. The OP said nothing that remotely hinted at that.


> It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad!

Steven Pinker has made a career out of this. Ironically a lot of his adherents are quick to jump on the "this is the safest time in human history" statistical warbling when discussing an issue they feel doesn't personally affect them.


Steven Pinker made claims about humanity as a whole. We can definitely be in the safest period in human history while at the same time having some cities that are pretty dangerous


It is the safest time in human history. Not for your laptop sitting in a car perhaps, but the greater context is important.


I mean, violent crime really has fallen dramatically in the past 30 years, at least in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...

That doesn't mean cities like SF aren't outliers, of course. But it really is the safest period of US history


This happened to me in much smaller and "safer" cities as well. This is America


It’s impossible to reason with anyone from SF who thinks the city isn’t that bad. Reality is most large cities are absolute trash now. But at least where i live i can talk with people who aren’t living in some reality distortion field


I miss the 1970s, when big cities were just swell!


>It’s impossible to reason with anyone from SF who thinks the city isn’t that bad. Reality is most large cities are absolute trash now. But at least where i live i can talk with people who aren’t living in some reality distortion field

I'm 56 years old and have lived in NYC for most of my life. And I can tell you (and provide appropriate statistics if you're unwilling or unable to look for that easily available data) that NYC (I can't speak to SF, although my brother and his family lived there for many years -- including in the Tenderloin -- and I found it a delightful place) is enormously safer and cleaner than it was for the first 35 or so years of my life.

When I was a child, there were street gangs in most neighborhoods, people would put signs on their car windows noting the lack of valuables inside in hopes of not having their windows smashed (In one case, circa 1978-80 I saw a car with its window smashed and the little sign that had been on the window saying "no radio, nothing of value, and the perpetrator of the vandalism wrote "just checking" on the sign). You almost never see that any more.

Streetwalkers were in most neighborhoods (even the nice neighborhoods), leaving used condoms to litter the streets every morning, Times Square was a shithole. No Disney store -- mostly just porn shops and peep shows, and with con artists, robbers and other miscreants.

Cocaine (crack, mostly) was openly sold on street corners even in wealthy neighborhoods.

Homicides in 2020 were less than 1/3 what they were in 1980[0] (and while that number increased significantly in 1987, that was because of a change in classification when "cause of death" was "unknown", the death being classed as "homicide" whereas previously, those were not included in "homicides" previously[1].

So, no. Large cities (and SF among them -- although NYC is, on a per-capita basis even safer than SF) in the US are, for the most part, enormously safer than they were even 15 years ago.

And since you don't seem to have much of an idea of what's really going on (and maybe don't care if it doesn't fit your trained-in prejudices?), I'll give you a tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!

[0] https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/...

[1] I searched around a bit, but couldn't find anything online, but that's true for a lot of news from before 2005 or so. But it was big news, because (see graph in [0] above) "homicides" increased significantly due to this change.

Edit: Fixed typo.


> It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.

"You can be mad but I guess I don’t personally view my car as an extension of myself and I’ve never really felt violated any of the 15 or so times my car was broken in to. Once a guy accidentally left a cool knife in my car so if it keeps happening you might get a little treat." --Seth Rogen


I’ve been accosted by strange people in multiple cities if that’s the standard of disorder now. Not saying it’s nice for that to happen but I don’t think it says much about SF.


>I’ve been accosted by strange people in multiple cities if that’s the standard of disorder now. Not saying it’s nice for that to happen but I don’t think it says much about SF.

As have I. One of the most serious was at the bus station in the huge metropolis of Santa Cruz, CA[0] (population ~63,000 in 2020).

As I've said elsewhere many, many times: There are assholes everywhere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz,_California


I also lived in San Francisco. Was never threatened by a random weirdo. Lived in a different city and was threatened (he said he would beat me to death). But somehow the city I live doesn't have constant bellyaching about how dangerous it is despite having a higher violent crime rate than San Francisco.


>It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.

You are making the poster's exact point for them. Take a step back, breathe, think.


And as other folks in this topic are pointing out, anecdotes like that are simply misleading. San Francisco is not a high crime US city. Period. It is not. It is middle-of-the-pack at worst. Nor is it getting "worse faster". It saw a crime wave across the pandemic that is receding now, just like most of the world.

It's just wrong. You're wrong. Any narrative to the effect of "SF is unsafe because of ..." is wrong, because SF is not unsafe in any measurable way.

And more to the point: those very (wrong) narratives are simply out of control among the prevailing demographic here on HN. And frankly it's getting kinda toxic.


> SF is not unsafe in any measurable way.

Well, no. SF is not unsafe in any measured way. You can easily observe from this thread, anecdotally, the police routinely ignore people shouting threats and other crimes. It's entirely possible that if we actually measured all of those, and counted them as the crimes that they are, that SF would look remarkably worse.


Do police measure "shouting threats and other crimes" anywhere, though? You're literally inventing a new category of crime just to be able to claim SF is the worst. Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?

Blunt counter-hypothesis: Tech bros are a bunch of suburban snowflakes who never lived in a dense urban environment before and are addressing their culture clash with hate instead of understanding. This is anecdotally true in my experience, which means I'm right by your logic, no?


> You're literally inventing a new category of crime

There are actual laws against threatening people I'm not inventing anything. I grew up in a major city with plenty of crime problems, and I still absolutely expected police to respond to someone who had a knife and was threatening to kill people. Clearly things have gotten worse if they're now ignoring such crimes.

> Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?

First, I never claimed SF was the worse - I simply said we don't have enough information to make reasonable conclusions in either direction.

Second, Occam's razor says that if the crime statistics are the same in two cities, but we have a ton of anecdotal evidence that one city is ignoring certain crimes, then that latter city probably has a higher crime rate.

If we had page after page of anecdotes that SF techies are just snowflakes and what they're responding to is totally normal, that would obviously change the equation.

Of course, keep in mind, if you're right, we've simply established that EVERY major urban center has a huge problem of "crazy people threatening people on a regular basis", and that's still an incredibly undesirable situation that we want to fix.

I'd also be curious why I don't hear about people from New York, London, Seattle, etc. reporting that it's totally normal for crazy people to threaten them with a knife. Surely there are techbro snowflakes in Seattle, at a minimum?


Which all has jack and shit to do with this case.


> I just simply moved out.

Thank you!


No, it would be the narrative where multiple HN commenters in the previous thread took this as a launching point to call for a full authoritarian crackdown of the homeless.




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