People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.

Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.

On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.

Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.

You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.

To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.

Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program

Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.

I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.

Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from strangers [1]

[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.

Here's more stats for perspective:

- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.

- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).

You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.

[1] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Visi...

What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.

*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.

Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.

[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]

---

There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.

These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.

Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation. (Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)

"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)

Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s

Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.

To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.

To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.

This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.

If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.

They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.

Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.

It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.

Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.

Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.

The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.

Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.

I totally agree with you. Suicide by firearm is not gun violence.

What I see is people seeing statistics that say counting suicide in firearm deaths is inappropriate. This is why the CDC has to call it out separately, to avoid the furore. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...).

The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.

Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.

Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics

Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.

Obviously others will have different experiences than me.

Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.

Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.

Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.

And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.

The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.

But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].

Quite unique, indeed.

In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.

That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.

Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr

It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.

I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.

Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.

That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.

From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.

I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.

Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.

Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right decision by staying away from the US despite the significant wage disparity.

Looks like you will never make it to the C level, sorry to break it to you. You "don't have what it takes" to make the difficult choices like endangering your entire workforce for vanity and ego purposes.

Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?

Where are you seeing the $1.7m is still getting spent?

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/noe-valley-s-pricey-p...

Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax break, they will force you to come to the office because the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in seats and the employees will be forced to take on the non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent refunds during lockdowns because of this.

This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.

People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.

As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.

Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.

SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.

People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.

- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.

- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.

So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.

The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.

Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.

So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.

If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.

Not where it is lowest per square mile.

"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."

I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.

The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.

While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"

If shootings were randomly distributed by a mechanical process with uniform distribution among everybody who has the address registered on this street, it would be true. But that's not how shootings work. You confuse a simplifying assumption - that is made for the purposes of modeling, because it's impossible to model the life of every person - with actual reality of what is happening. What is happening is if there's a shootout every day on the street, and you live on that street, and you are a sane person, you would be afraid to go on that street, because the next person shot could be you. And that's the rational behavior, while "I don't care for the shots I hear, these numbers on screen say it's ok" is wildly irrational.

> If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.

Again, no, because shootings aren't a random lottery allocated uniformly by independent metric, like an address. It's connected to your behavior, so if you go to the street where shootings happen, you risk being shot. And how many people are registered on the same street has very little to do with that.

> it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"

And again, it would be, if we were dealing with uniform random distribution. That's not what actually happens - if 100 people live in a safe neighborhood and I have to walk the street where druggies hash out their quarrels - the averages are not going to help me. Remember, Bill Gates walks into a bar... how richer have you just become by sitting in that bar?

1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.

2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.

Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.

Top violent crime rate per capita US cities [1]:

1. St. Louis 2. Detroit 3. Baltimore 4. Memphis 5. Kansas City

If we include all crime and not just violent crime, it’s still all large cities at the top. Not sure where you’re getting your info.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

Per capita, smaller cities are outstanding in their crime.

Even Baltimore is down in 51st place.

This list is incomplete to boot. Large cities often called "war zone" by culture war fighters are largely safer than being in a small town.

And yet Musk proves you wrong: https://www.tesla.com/giga-berlin

https://freespeechunion.org/young-afd-politician-convicted-f...

Björn Höcke. Apparently the slogan "Alles für Deutschland" (Everything for Germany) is strictly verboten because a Nazi organization used it. I didn't know that before the Höcke verdict and I doubt most Germans did. I also very much doubt that it was in any way used as a Nazi reference.

Germany's penal code does ban certain non-specified symbols -- which makes a lot sense based on Germany's recent history. Unfortunately, the law is applied extremely selectively and in quite creative ways for opinions that some people just don't like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

Why does Germany pretend Die Linke (The Left -- the renamed East German Communist Party) is a perfectly normal and legal party and at the same time that the perfectly normal and legal (and not very much on the right) party AfD is quasi-Nazi?

From personal experience, I did not feel particularly safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).

Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there. One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation, but it's very small and easy to avoid.

I would personally care way more about the crime density like per mile or something because that is what would actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would happen in close proximity to me that could put me in potential danger.

I couldn't care less about the crime per population.

If the crime is higher per person, but the crimes are several miles away then why would that be a problem for me?

Compared to lower crimes per person, but the crimes are happening on my street.

If the crimes are happening closer to me I'm more likely to be affected by it in some way.

Higher rate per person means it is literally more likely to happen to you.

High rate per area but low rate per person means I guess that you're more likely to be a witness. Low rate per area but high rate per person means you're likely to be a victim.

I also think that whether or not you end up being a victim has a lot more to do than simply crimes per person.

I don't think whether you end up a victim is evenly distributed to every single person.

I think that the way you live and act and guard against things can affect your personal chances differently and that physical proximity can end up playing a role.

Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system, attractive social services (compared to the rest of the US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.