crime in SF has absolutely exploded
These don't seem to be reflected in easily googleable stats
https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1400&fn[]=2...
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
The problem could be solved by repealing proposition 58 and 13, establishing a state board of commisioners to reappraise all land at the state level at present market valuations, and replacing sales taxes with distributive land taxes. But property owners obviously don't want to hear that and would prefer to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
"Where does California's Homeless Population Come From?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
> Data about migration to California from other states among the housed population showed that the largest group of transplants to the state were actually college-educated professionals
> “I hear a lot of people complain that the homeless people are all from ‘somewhere else,’” wrote Ms. Kroger of Stockton, a lifelong Californian. “I think it might raise empathy and compassion if it turns out that the majority of the people who have been displaced are from the very communities in which they are now trying to survive on the streets.”
This, like so much of the political data wars over SMI, SA & transients, is partially true in coastal California.
The reality is usually found in non politician friendly audits such as the Sonoma county grand jury findings or the recent California wide audit.
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/state-auditor-releases...
http://sonoma.courts.ca.gov/sites/all/assets/pdfs/general-in...
California has huge numbers of vehicle living transients who understandably migrate from colder and hotter climes across America, half the US homeless according to the recent audit.
The bigger issue locally in California is migration from places like Redding down to the bay area, encouraged by the street grapevine about prop 47 lack of law enforcement, rich pickings and relaxed drug rules. In San Francisco drug dealers are commuting in from the central valley with Meth and Fentanyl, the current core are Hondurans.
The best way to find out what is really going on is to talk to homeless people, ask them where they are from, talk to local emergency response crews and find out about HUD oversight of Continuum of Care, who in turn are supposed to provide oversight of the CDC. I strongly recommend taking politician and 'non profit' pr and stats with a strong pinch of salt...
There are all sorts of stats and data out there. finding accurate information is very hard. Most counties have HMIS systems but many are not well maintained which tends to lead to very inaccurate data reporting.
There is also the issue that the moment a person arrives in California and sits on the pavement they are considered a 'resident' by many of the data capture folks, many of whom are pursuing ideological agendas.
That's true, do you happen to recall the sources of the ones you cited?
The police officer said he was glad to have the license plate number but that robbery is so low-profile in the courts right now that even if they did catch him, without video proof, the thieves would be let go within a day or so.
No, the officer didn't take action based upon what they saw, but it's reasonable to conclude that a police report was filled out for this incident.
Reasons cops file reports include:
An intention to investigate the crime
The victim requests a report for an insurance claim
In this case they know it’s a hard crime to investigate. Based on the articles I’ve read, it seems thieves in SF often use stolen cars, so even the plates may not be that helpful. Moreover we have serious crimes like attempted murder and illegal gun possession in SF going un-prosecuted, so the cops cannot assume an arrest could lead to anything at all.
Additionally filing a report with little hope for an arrest makes the precincts numbers look bad. Those numbers will get reported in neighborhood association meetings, and those association people (I’m one of them) can be a real pain in the ass to the politicians (i.e. the boss’s boss’s boss).
It’s just not a good incentive structure and if we were going to do a clean redesign IMO the politicians and cops should have as little control over the official statistics as possible.
When the data doesn't support your views – "it isn't reported correctly anyways".
This is standard online discourse.
Homelessness is indeed a problem, but according to the biannual survey, most of the unhoused are from the bay area. This suggested the crisis is the result of skyrocketing rents and the steady disappearance of SROs. Yet another thing we can thank Nimbys for.
Shoplifting does appear to be a real issue, although it's unclear why it's so much worse in SF. Proposition 47 is statewide after all.
I was born and raised in SF. Crime was much much worse in the 80s and 90s. Not saying we don't need changes, but it isn't a post apocalyptic hellhole... Yet.
I think part of what is happening is that criminals refocused on residents because there aren’t tourists around to prey on anymore.
Chesa Boudin made it worse. No more bail so people accused of crime are free to sometimes commit more crime. $950 and below shoplifting is now a misdemeanor.
Walgreens doesn’t even report the shoplifting anymore. They just closed stores. 13 and counting.
SF does look a little cleaner now than a few months ago. The tent city at City Hall is hidden behind a fence. The tents in other parts of town tend to be clustered in alleys instead of along main streets. Still far fewer people walking around than before. Interestingly, the Marina looks as rich and lively as ever unlike many other parts of SF.
The City feels dead. SF Chinatown looks and sounds more like Oakland Chinatown now. Quieter. Far less car traffic and traffic noise. Easier to find parking. Few tourists. Mostly locals.
The city also feels dead because tourism everywhere in the U.S. is currently dead. SF Chinatown is most definitely not comparable to the state of Oakland Chinatown:
https://abc7news.com/man-shot-killed-in-broad-daylight-oakla...
Oakland's homicide rate is skyrocketing, but so are its housing prices. Goes to show that in the Bay Area as a whole, crime and desirability of living often fail to correlate. SF's problem might simply be people don't want to live in a dense area during a societal shutdown.
Violent crime has increased in the cities based on statistics that I have read.
Walgreens is probably multifactor but it is guaranteed that the shoplifting hurt badly.
Yes the cities are dead partly due to lost of tourism. However, it isn’t only that. Commercial real estate occupancy rates are worse than during the dot com bust.
Real estate is multifactor. Real estate is booming everywhere in the Bay Area possibly with the exception of SF, not just Oakland.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/opinion/New-York-San-Fran...
So yes, SF's crime issues are a pervasive problem. But the current decline ultimately all come down to economic factors and simple geography. Maybe Boudin has exacerbated things, but he has been in office for a minute compared to the past decade of spiraling property crime in the city.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/audit-california-track-h...
Step 1. Get elected.
Step 2. Convince a friend that they should really establish an organization to fight homelessness.
Step 3. Impose a gross receipts tax to fund fighting homelessness, structured as financial support for "non-profits" with an aligned charter.
Step 4. Leave office and serve on the board of the organization your "friend" established.
End result: you've essentially elected yourself a salary paid for out of the communal treasury. The "let's just throw money at the problem" type of mindset is especially susceptible to supporting these taxes. They see the problem and obviously want to support solving it but don't follow up on the flow of money.
IMO politicians should be required to be actively performing civic duties to be getting paid by tax money. And all taxes should default to being (or be required to be) repealed after a fixed term. The people must elect to re-impose the tax based on their perception of whether it was effective or not.
How would one balance the issue of disrupted mental health, with clear impediments of decision-making, against violations of personal liberty, such as with forcible commitment.
It's time we put virtue signalling aside when it comes to medical treatment. If someone is experiencing hypothermia and not in the right state of mind, we don't allow them to strip off their clothes in confusion even if that is the natural stress response to hypothermia, we hold them down and get them warm and well. If your friend is drunk and belligerent, you keep them home where they can sober up safely instead of letting them wander into traffic, even if they try and wrestle away. We should do the same for those suffering from mental illness, who due to their illness are in no state to care for their wellbeing, and we should do what we can to treat them until they are in the right state of mind.
On an aside, it's funny how "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" had such an impact on mental health treatment, and how mental health institutions were viewed.
People in affluent areas of SF seem oblivious to all this and keep voting - and donating - to the political class who tell them everything is finally going great... and they assume this is true. https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/walgreens-and-cvs-stores...
ABC stores in Honolulu employ the same strategy. There are mutilple ABC stores on the same block sometimes.
This is sort of misleading. Burglaries, motor vehicle thefts, and homicides went up, but all other crimes went down. Specifically in the case of homicides, there were 7 more compared to 2019.
> I have never seen it this bad.
Crime is still at an all time low in SF. The rate of crimes has roughly remained static for the better part of two decades. The increased number of homeless just makes it more visible.
For crimes like assault though, if the police convince the victim that reporting it is pointless, it doesn't show up in the stats. Anecdotally, this is what I have heard is happening.
hmm...
...but other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
And yet Western Europe doesn't suffer anything even close to San Francisco's crime levels.
Theft is effectively legal in SF. Is it in those places?
> booking processes more traumatic
Subjective nonsense.
> prison terms longer, prison conditions an order of magnitude worse, and supervised release much more onerous.
In SF, theft does not receive "prison terms".
See also:
"By the people" by Charles Murray
"Three felonies a day" by Harvey Silverglate
Unfortunately the political right is unbelievably bad at protest efforts.
The problem is a large numbers of voters in SF don't realize it's bad policy, and maybe a bigger problem would be why are district attorneys elected positions in the first place?
Knowing what I know about bay area politics, I bet half the people who voted for him will say that crime in San Francisco is not the district attorney's fault and blame Regan for closing down the mental hospitals in the 70s.
I live just outside San Francisco city limits and everything is peaceful, because the criminals know that the laws are enforced here. It's that simple. Encountering homeless people shitting in front of me, or screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs at 2 a.m or whatever was a regular occurrence in S.F. I thought about homeless people every day in S.F. I don't think about homeless people at all where I live now.
The homeless budget in S.F is $300 million dollars a year. That employs a lot of people! Where I live now it's not a whole lot and yet there is no homeless problem.
But it probably goes: SF spends a lot of money on services for the homeless, so lots of homeless people keep going there to get those services. Other places don't spend any money on services for the homeless, so the homeless people leave.
If every place spent a little bit on services for the homeless, there would be just a few homeless everywhere instead of lots of homeless in a few places and no homeless in other places. But that would require coordination to ensure nobody free-rides and just lets other places take on the homeless.
$300 million is a lot though. I've worked on construction projects building ~250 unit apartment buildings that had budgets of $25 million. It seems like you could just build actual housing for most of the homeless with that kind of budget. (Of course that would require SF to allow housing to be built).
I think a lot of San Francisco's problems come from too much tax money. They have a $12.3 billion dollar budget. That's more than some small European countries! The city collects an enormous amount of taxes from all the tech money and needs to do something with it so they get the big idea that they are going to try and fix all social problems with the universal and only solution to all problems: more money.
That's really not a realistic view of the situation though. Pretty much everywhere in the US, _all_ major cities at the very least, have "services for the homeless".
I think the problem lies a lot in the "progressive" idea that people claiming "homeless" somehow classifies for a privileged status. They setup a "homeless class" of people that don't have to work, and get paid to do so. The worse they act, the bigger the "problem" is according to their "caretakers" and the only outcome they can expect is to get an even _bigger_ payout.
In most major cities, shelters require a certain code of conduct. Those that don't abide by it get ousted, suffer the cold of winter, and buck up and man up and deal with it. In SF, they just camp out in the nicest of areas, people cry "hey there's some victims!" and they get an even bigger reward for their degeneracy. People that think they're helping stop some sort of cycle are literally just working at creating the feedback loop.
I think it's more likely than you expect, at least on the very vocal group that is aggressively pushing the overton window on our views on the social contract.
Read “the righteous mind” by Jonathan Haidt. Great audiobook too.
Now the question is do voters realize that benchmark can be artificially lowered by terrible policies that don't help anyone other than make some people "feel good"? We can literally make all crimes legal and we'd end up with an incarceration rate and prison population of zero.
I’ve seen the logic used by many in SF.
The problem isn't with the position of DA, it's with "progressive" voters.
Much of the platform is based on feelings and ideology instead of facts and problem solving, but it manages to even be worse than the right wing counterpart somehow because it comes served with a side dish of "holier and smarter than thou!"
[1] https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1400&fn[]=2...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/audit-california-track-h...
My opinion is that this is a national problem and we should revert back to a new version of JFK's 1960's model for HUD
If triggered it should spray a combination of fart spray, glitter, pepper spray, honey, flour, feathers, ink, in all directions. [EDIT: let's take out the pepper spray, see comments]
As a bonus it would also be useful against towing people who try to tow without contacting the owner, but the primary use case would be thieves.
I've seen so many companies making dash cams and things of the like, but considering SF does nothing even given evidence, it's time to actually spray the perpetrator with something nasty and embarrassing.
A micro solution to protect my own property would be nice until the macro solution people get their act together.
Also, same for tow trucks. They should call the number on the dashboard -- which does the least damage to the car and saves the most peoples' time, and is therefore the optimal solution -- before attempting to tow or they're in for a nice fart.
Skunks don't hurt but people sure do fear them and the unpleasantness that may ensue if you mess with them.
I mean, I'm all for fixing poverty but I'm still going to want to protect my stuff in the mean time. In fact it's because I'm not rich and I can't afford to replace all my property. If I was a billionaire I couldn't care less about a $5K camera system but I'm not.
Wouldn't believe it could happen before i saw it. "criminals are so desperate these no point" is not something i buy anymore, they clearly aren't always fully sold on what their doing, especially if young and any little thing could be enough for them to turn back.
Even the popular myth that a fire alarm pull station will stain your hands with ink is based on an actual product. High schools with a string of false alarms will sometimes put a marking compound on the handle that is indelible and changes to a bright color when someone tries to wash it off their hands.
Spraying a thief with fart spray and glitter is not illegal.
The fart spray and glitter bomb, would be interesting to see how it would be interpreted. I wouldn’t want to be the test case for it!
I don't understand why. I hear talk about "priorities". Perhaps it's true that it's not "worth" enforcing these because the people responsible don't have any money to pay fines. But on the other hand, I don't think police actually got defunded, so if they've de-prioritized a major chunk of their job, what are they doing instead? I have basically no idea. Extra public safety things during the pandemic? It'd be nice to think they're doing a better job closing felonies but I haven't heard any evidence of that. Are they sitting around doing nothing? I almost hope they are; my more pessimistic take is that they now can really spend extra quality time harassing minorities...
[1] meaning it seems widely believed, correctly or not
Prop 47 was passed 2014. The opioid crisis has been going on forever. People are using these stories to fuel their political biases.
Remove enforcement of several crimes and see it have areas reminiscent of 3rd world countries in a matter of years.
(But don't expect this to be in any sociological studies, scholars will still blame "lack of education", "lack of opportunities", etc, while those have a role to play, the major factor that changed here is pretty obvious)
This is just a wild thing to claim.
I agree that the homeless situation is bad. I don't think blanket claims that other "first world" countries handle it much better are necessarily true, unfortunately.
These were probably either recent migrants ("refugees" for lack of a better term) or Roma camps (which are not today's problem). They could as well just be homeless, sure (depends on the park, location, etc). Mostly, they are the result of progressive policies gone unchecked as well.
But are these in the same quantity/concentration and causing as much trouble and being as aggressive as the ones in SF?
Very true. Neither does San Francisco, of course.
> But are these in the same quantity/concentration and causing as much trouble and being as aggressive as the ones in SF?
Absolutely not. My point was that San Francisco's problem is not obviously that it's in a "third-world country".
Since then crime in SF has absolutely exploded, fuelled by proposition 47 which reduced stealing less than $900 day to a misdemeanor. Add in a massive opioid crisis and the result is a rapidly growing crisis of shoplifting, petty theft, home invasions, carjacking and general armed thuggery.
The rapidly growing homeless population ( half US homeless are in California with migrants arriving daily) makes the situation worse with drug dealers preying on the vulnerable. I lived in San Francisco for close to 25 years and am now 50 miles north. I'll be in the city tomorrow. I have never seen it this bad, or seen so many predators watching and waiting to strike.
It's still a beautiful place, but you really need to keep your wits about you and stay aware at all times.