I don't think that's true at all. People say that crime increased in San Francisco because of the more progressive DA, but ignore that crime increased less in San Francisco than nationwide.

You can't talk about crime statistics without talking about whether people are actually reporting crimes at the same rate.

It's entirely possible that a city with a progressive DA that doesn't prosecute certain types of crimes sufficiently or judges that don't actually pull criminals off the streets, end up with a social atmosphere where citizens don't bother reporting crime as much, because they know nothing will be done about it anyway.

Adding to that, police don't operate in a vacuum and may respond to the election of a progressive DA by reducing their level of effort, whether that's in retaliation, or out of a fear of being prosecuted for misconduct, or as a form of strike [1]. Or, like you said, we just see drops because they don't bother to make arrests they know won't get prosecuted (e.g. nonviolent drug arrests in philly following Larry Krasner's election follow this pattern [2]). Or, its some demographic, or socioecenomic, or some other trend unrelated to the DA (or which also happened to result in the DA being elected in the first place).

Basically, stats are hard, crime stats are really hard, and someone who tells you Crime rates did X because Person A did thing Y without a 20 page paper probably doesn't have a clue, including me.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/170-atlanta-police-offic...

[2] https://data.philadao.com/Arrest_Report.html

They may not report those crimes to the police, but police reports aren't the only way to find out data on crime rates. Stores will still report shoplifting loses to their insurance companies for example.

Crimes we know nothing about have tripled!

Do you have any numbers that shows this? To discuss the disproportionate rise in crime in progressive DAs’ cities isn’t to ignore the rise in crime across the board.

Some relevant links:

https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/

https://citycrimestats.com/statistics/

https://applieddivinitystudies.com/sf-crime-2/

Except for property crimes, there are reason to believe that the official statistics are totally unrepresentative of actual number of crimes committed. For instance: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Targ...

Sure, the statistics are not very good, but we don't have anything better. We have some evidence that property crime has gone down relative to other parts of the country (and much better evidence for homicide, which doesn't have the same under-reporting risk), and no evidence (as far as I know) for the opposite.

> I don't think that's true at all. People say that crime increased in San Francisco because of the more progressive DA, but ignore that crime increased less in San Francisco than nationwide.

Well, yeah ... if shoplifting isn't reported as a crime, then it doesn't matter how high the shoplifting rate goes, then official crime rate will still be low.

TLDR: If shoplifting is unreported, then reported levels of shoplifting will be zero.

The shoplifting rates in big cities rose by about 70% from their 1980 to early '90s, then fell fairly steadily to around 60% of '80s levels until around 2007, then started rising again. They got back to their '80s level around 2015 and and swung around that by about 10% since then, until there was a drop at the start of the pandemic.

In small cities the pattern was the same except the peak around 1990 was a bit lower, the decline through mid-2000s only got down to a little below '80s levels, and the 2015ish rise wasn't as big (although because the earlier decline didn't get much below '80s levels the small city rates were higher than big city rates).

This article has a nice graph of this from an FBI report [1].

[1] https://thedispatch.com/p/mismeasuring-the-shoplifting-crisi...

Except that is nit true. Tough on crime cities had crime wave too, bigger one.

It was more about emotional investment into "gotta imprison as many people as possible".

You have proof of causality in that direction, right?

It's not fair to discuss this without data.

The problem is that we don't have any high quality data on most crimes. Virtually all murders are reported. But victims often don't report lesser crimes, especially in places like San Francisco where they know that the police won't bother to investigate and the DA won't bother to prosecute.

The closest thing we have is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), but so far they only have data through 2020.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs#publications-0

Arguments put forward without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Honestly Walter, if shoplifting is decriminalized then it won't count as 'crime' will it? It's in the word.

From what I can see the trend has more to do with covid restrictions lifting than anything else. Violent crimes and gun-based homicides are the things that have risen most sharply, so that has little to do with larceny.

And generally speaking, if you are frustrated by shoplifting, you should be even more frustrated by civil asset forfeiture, which deprives Americans of more wealth than all burglaries put together. However, it is state sanctioned with no real recourse or insurance to protect victims.