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.