You can look at the data for San Francisco on the police department website:

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

Comparing August 2021 to August 2020 Larceny/Theft is up 11.5%, Assault is up 34.6%, Robbery is up 16.3%. And that doesn't count the people who just don't bother to report crimes because they know nothing will be done about it. Your link says its data ends in 2019 and has only limited, preliminary data from 2020. If property crime is down, why are retailers closing stores and cutting hours due to rampant shoplifting?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/target-closing-san-fran...

> We used to throw "crazy" people into institutions without a second thought, but that changed a long time ago and not just in California. If you want to bring that back I'm afraid you'll face an uphill battle, but more power to you.

False dichotomy. We don't need to imprison people with Nurse Ratched and give them forced lobotomies to get dangerously unbalanced people off the streets. Whatever the solution is, CA's policy is clearly not working as evidenced by the growing tent cities.

My comments were about California overall, and San Francisco isn’t California. Even if it were, crime can be trending down over time even if there have been recent spikes that are worth addressing.

I just don’t think it’s fair to call the state a nightmare hellscape.

On Nurse Ratched … you’re twisting my words. I didn’t say the alternative was torturing the mentally ill, I said it was institutionalizing them. Deinstitutionalization had benefits and drawbacks, one of the latter of which was the severely mentally ill now being homeless.

How does every developed country manage to be so much cleaner then? I find all your excuses inadequate. And we still have the highest poverty rate in the country—it probably only marginally declined due to stimulus and COVID relief.

There are more tents and people camping on the street and openly using drugs and brazenly stealing than ever before. California looks like a failing civilization to people from Western Europe.

Property crime is “down” because CA now doesn’t consider anything below $1,000 damage a crime.

This isn't true; the law you're probably thinking of merely reclassified felonies as misdemeanors. And even if it were true that damages < $1000 weren't prosecuted they'd still show up in crime statistics. Even even if that weren't the case, you wouldn't see a steady decrease in property crime every year -- you'd see a sudden dropoff in 2014.

Nice try, though!