I often hear claims like this, such as about catalytic converter theft, and I think: that happens back home in Midwest, rural Iowa. Des Moines, Iowa has a similar crime rate to San Francisco! There aren't order of magnitude differences between my small home town, where I was born, or any other town I could find.
Don't let news reports overwhelm your availability heuristic. If crime rates are roughly similar everywhere, but some cities are more dense yet share a common news or media environment, what does that suggest?
People make a lot of noise about SF being a place where innovation happens, but criminals aren’t doing any of that.
What you’re likely getting in SF is there being no meaningful gap between the rich areas of SF and the poor. In larger cities you aren’t going to get hyperventilating about “person driving through [high crime neighborhood] was car jacked” but you would if it was [rich low crime neighbourhood] - but the general case means that the majority of such crimes don’t get TV coverage.
What is happening in SF is you have a large swathe of rich and upper middle class folk actually living in and around lower income neighbourhoods they’ve been able to avoid when they live in other cities. They rightly go “this crime is bad”, but their reason for it being bad is that for the first time they’re directly exposed to it.
These are the people who say “we should ban homeless people”, but don’t give a shit what actually happens to them: they can remain homeless, what matters is that the homeless people don’t impact their lives.
That makes it high crime in my book.
An extreme scenario:
When I was a student, a person broke into our flat and stole some stuff (but weirdly, despite clearly checking, none of my DVDs nor my SoundBlaster! Extigy :D). This did not even get into local news. But if someone had broken into BillG's house and judged his DVD collection to be similarly terrible that would be in the news.
If you are saying the determining factor as to whether crime happens, or a crime rate is "high", is more heavily weighted by "does this crime impact the upper class?" I'm not sure what to say.
What matters is whether it's "news worthy". BillG being robbed would be news because he's a celebrity. The news is where or why, but that it's them.
That's why the news reports on Lance Reddick dying on March 17 2023, but basic obituary search finds multiple other people in Studio City who died the same week and they did not get new reports. If we based our ideas of mortality on news reports we'll find that cities that have more celebrities have higher rates of elder mortality.