Police department crime statistics in San Francisco are so unreliable that a single store electing to report all shoplifting incidents tripled the citywide rate: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Targ.... Many policy changes are being enacted throughout the city such as teachers who were beaten deaf by their students not being allowed to file a police report: https://missionlocal.org/2022/04/total-meltdown-at-everett-m....

Homicides give a useful corrective since they’re harder to under report.

Given this fact and the various confounders (e.g. how do you rob or assault someone during a time of complete shutdown, how does nilling out the substantial daytime population increase do to per capita rates, is an overdose death really not worth reporting in crime statistics), at best we don’t know what actually happened to violent crime rates in the last three years.