What are the actual rates of confirmed stores closing? What were they in previous decades? What are other factors -- a pandemic hurting downtown traffic, for example -- that might affect those closures? Can we compare the rates of restaurants closing to the rates of retail stores closing across the years to see if retail stores are closing at a higher rate than restaurants?
And to be clear, I don't see either side of the debate doing that research. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just saying we should follow the data.
1) You're not seeing a full feed of all video that gets shot; you're seeing what various media outlets choose to share.
2) Humans being humans, we're more primed to grab video when we're seeing other videos, so you'd expect the distribution not to reflect the ground truth.
I am aware that I won't convince you, but I also need to point out that at least one of the articles I linked to shows stats from adjacent jurisdictions with different laws and charging protocols which don't support the "more crime in SF" thesis.
So it goes.
There are however ways that don't depend on the government. For instance, videos of looting. I've seen a riridulous number of looting videos from LA and SF (and other crimes too). No other state produces so much video of criminal activity from random observers.