How Safe is San Francisco?
A tale of 30 cities
As a longtime San Francisco resident, it’s been strange to watch the city become a political flashpoint.
Youtube videos rack up 2 million views calling SF “one of the most dangerous places to live”. The NY Post declares “Nowhere in San Francisco is safe from crime”. Andrew Callaghan records open-air fentanyl use and a carjacker stealing a pizza delivery man’s Prius “within 90 seconds of being in San Francisco.” Upon learning I live in SF, my grandma’s rural Michigan friends ask “How is everything out there?” in a tone that conveys they think everything is fucked.
Naturally, progressives leap to SF’s defense. YouTubers make counter-programming sarcastically saying, “San Francisco is so ugly” over beautiful shots of the Golden Gate Bridge. On the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, former Jerry Brown press secretary and now-journalist Gil Duran says:
San Francisco actually has a very low crime rate compared to other cities in the United States, especially violent crime and homicide.
He’s talking about data, and everyone else is alluding to it, so let’s look at it.
Below, I compiled the 2022 crime statistics for the largest 30 US cities1 (minus Jacksonville, who didn’t post their full data online):
For starters, we can see that Duran’s claim that SF has “a very low crime rate” in comparison to other cities is false. However, his claim that SF has low levels of violent crime is pretty much true, especially with regard to murder.
(Edit: a comment points out that this definition of ‘low’ is relative to other large cities, which ignores the fact that cities have higher rates of violent crime. This is a fair point, and something I may address in later posts. But for this post, I want to focus on how SF compares to similarly-sized US cities, and whether it deserves to be singled out.)
But before diving into SF, I want to cover some counterintuitive but important aspects of crime rates.
First, they treat every offense as interchangeable. One murder, one mugging, and one shoplifted pack of gum are the same in the all-seeing eyes of the overall crime rate. So, if we single-mindedly wanted to lower the crime rate, two shoplifting incidents would be ‘worse’ than one murder.
As a corollary, the least serious offenses have the greatest impact on the crime rate because they’re more common. Murder is very rare, so murder can jump 50% but barely nudge the overall rate. In contrast, larceny-theft (which covers shoplifting and car break-ins, among others) makes up a plurality of crime in most cities, and therefore greatly sways the overall crime rate.
This is true regardless of how we bucket crime. When reporting offenses, police departments separate violent crime — homicide2, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — from property crime — motor vehicle theft, burglary, and larceny-theft. The most common violent offense is aggravated assault, so it shapes the violent crime rate. Larceny-theft, the most common and least severe property offense, shapes the property crime rate.
This can lead to topsy-turvy results where cities overrun with the worst crimes, but fewer minor crimes, have lower overall crime rates.
For example, compare Detroit and San Francisco. Detroit has twice as much motor vehicle theft, 3 times as much rape, 5 times as many aggravated assaults, and 7(!) times as many homicides. On the flipside, San Francisco has 36% more robberies and double the larceny theft offenses of Detroit. Given those stats, SF seems clearly safer than Detroit. I, and I suspect most people, would rather live in a city overrun with car break-ins than one overrun with murder. And yet, Detroit has a lower overall crime rate than SF and hence is, by some metric, ‘safer’.
In general, SF keeps the most severe crimes quite low, but does worse and worse as the crimes get less severe. Here’s the full rundown of SF’s standings among the largest 30 US cities in 2022:
24th highest (7th lowest) incidence of murder
23rd highest (8th lowest) incidence of rape
7th highest incidence of robbery
23rd highest (8th lowest) incidence of aggravated assault
12th highest incidence of motor vehicle theft
5th highest incidence of burglary
1st highest incidence of larceny-theft
A few random thoughts on that sky-high larceny-theft rate. First, it’s driven by car break-ins — not to be confused with motor vehicle theft, in which the car itself is stolen. Also, these statistics are from 2022, the most recent year I could find data across cities. Based on the SFPD’s numbers, larceny theft dropped 35% since 2022 and car break-ins dropped 51%(!) from 2023 to 2024. So SF’s crime numbers may look worse here than they are now.
(Edit: a comment correctly points out that car break-ins may actually be under-reported in cities where they’re endemic, since people don’t think police will do anything about them. I’m not sure how to account for this, but if you have bright ideas, let me know in the comments.)
Unfortunately, to make comparisons between cities, we’re stuck with 2022 data.
All together, out the largest 30 cities, SF sits at #18 in violent crime and #4 in property crime. Because (say it with me) less severe property crimes dictate the overall crime rate, SF has the 4th highest overall crime rate.
You can see how this flows down into two radically different takes on SF’s crime. For my money, “SF is one of the most dangerous places to live” and “SF actually has a very low crime rate” are both wrong. But I can see how these two narratives arise. As progressives claim, SF has a below average level of violent crime, especially for the most severe crimes, like murder. But SF’s overall crime rate is quite high due to all those car break-ins. And while this high rate isn’t driven by the most serious crimes, it is still a big problem.
Having lived in San Francisco for 13 years, this all jibes with my experience.
Petty theft is a big problem in SF, and anybody who tells you otherwise hasn’t lived here. Walgreens locks up everything, right down to the toothpaste. If you have a bike, you need a bikelock that weighs more than the bike itself. And every San Franciscan knows not to leave valuables visible in their car, where even a stray USB cable could count as valuable.
But just linking ‘SF’ with ‘crime’ can warp how dangerous it seems. A friend of a friend moved to SF recently and was very worried about their safety. Could they walk around at night? On what streets might they get shot?
Among my SF friends, these concerns sound almost comical. Yes, you should lock up your bike. Don’t leave things in your car. But in most neighborhoods, it’s totally safe to walk around at night. (Ok, the Tenderloin is sketchy, but even there, it’s more about what you’ll see — drugs, mental illness and homelessness — rather than what will happen to you.) You don’t need to worry about getting shot. And, again, the crime statistics back this up.
That said, focusing exclusively on crime statistics can miss part of what people mean when they talk about safety. I know, I know, this whole piece is about crime statistics! But violent crime, or even property crime, is only one part of what people mean when they talk about safety.
As Ezra Klein says, while SF may not have high violent crime:
There is a perception, widespread, that at least disorder — levels of disorder, levels of basic crimes — shoplifting, things like that — are tolerated [in San Francisco], in a way they aren’t elsewhere.
When people talk about feeling unsafe in SF, I think they’re talking about this feeling of disorder. Moreover, it’s not only crime that contributes to this feeling.
I don’t have the stats to back this up — it took me long enough to compile those crime numbers — but in my experience, SF has a very high rate of “unhinged person yelling indiscriminately in the street.” Or worse, a person yelling very discriminately, right at you. It’s happened to my friends; it’s happened to me. An Indian friend was called the n-word. One woman ran after me yelling that “she was going to make me her bitch.” Or maybe vice versa, I got out of there before I could find out. This doesn’t register as a crime, but it definitely made me feel less safe.
When people complain that SF isn’t safe, I think they’re often really complaining about this. Visitors (or residents who aren’t inured to it yet) see people with mental illness, public drug use, homelessness, and literal shit on the ground and think, “wow, this place is a mess.”
I very much don’t want to dismiss people’s concerns about this disorder. One, this disorder means the city is fundamentally failing a lot of people, including the people suffering from mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. Two, when people feel unsafe because a stranger is yelling at them, they’re afraid because they don’t know what the stranger might do next. Most of the time you walk away and nothing happens. But someone yelling “bitch!” at you, unprovoked, might also take a swing at you, unprovoked. You can’t dismiss the concern with “but the violent crime rate is low!” A stranger yelling at you isn’t as dangerous as someone shooting you, but it’s not nothing.
Still, it’s worth disentangling this sense of disorder — and the possible danger that comes with it — from other aspects of safety.
When you witness these problems and hear that SF has a high overall crime rate, it’s easy to assume that SF is riddled with every kind of crime. But as shown in the chart above, and as I keep harping on, SF has low rates of murder and rape. The crimes common in SF are generally a threat to property, not to people.
Still, if you have to quibble that the crime in your city isn’t killing people, jeez come on, that hints that your city has other safety problems.
Having lived here for more than a decade, this is the difficulty in talking about SF.
It’s hard to balance arguing against what the dystopian image of SF gets wrong, while agreeing with what it gets right. When I see videos that say “DO NOT Visit San Francisco” because “it’s not just one bad street, it’s everywhere”, it’s so clear that these people walked around the Tenderloin and SOMA and nowhere else. Walk around Noe Valley, or Bernal Heights, or the Presidio, or a dozen other neighborhoods in SF, and I challenge you not to think, “what a nice neighborhood!” San Francisco is a beautiful city with great bars and restaurants that I regularly walk to and from alone at night without a second thought. And yet, it also a city that struggles with car break-ins, drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. And while these are less prevalent in nice neighborhoods, they creep in everywhere. Residents (myself included) sometimes learn to avoid or accept these problems so well that we become blind to them.
The best I can do, and what I’m trying to do here, is paint a more nuanced picture. SF has real, big problems with crime, especially theft, and more generally, disorder. And yet you will be safe here, even if the laptop in your car is not. Even in the sketchiest neighborhood, the real concern is not that you’ll be harmed or robbed, but that you’ll witness homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction.
These facts about SF coexist side-by-side. If you look at individual measures — the high overall crime rate, the low murder rate — you can flatten the narrative of SF to suit your needs. But in its entirety, the city is more complicated than one measure can capture.
As noted in the caption, the primary source for this data is the FBI’s Crime in the US 2022 Annual Estimations. These are available under the “Crime in the United States Annual Reports”, selecting 2022 and CIUS (Crime in the US) from the two dropdowns. Within this data, I use the individual city crime stats, rather than those for the entire metropolitan statistical area (MSA). MSAs include suburbs, whose lower crime stats warp comparisons between cities.
Additionally, some city stats were not present in the FBI’s report. Fortunately, all cities use the FBI’s uniform crime reporting (UCR) standards. See the following links to see the UCR sources for NYC, SF, Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
In many data sources, this is called “Murder and non-negligent manslaughter”, which I’ve shortened to “Homicide” for brevity. Let me know if this is a gross misuse of terminology.
Thanks for the level headed analysis.
I largely agree with your point about the overall rate of violent crime here being low and the fact that this doesn’t necessarily translate to a feeling of safety.
However there’s a key component that’s missed.
This analysis doesn’t take into account the degree to which crimes on the less severe side of the spectrum are not reported at all. The only crime rates that are really reliable are murder rates. Things like burglary, car break ins, and even assaults often go unreported, especially in cities like SF, where there’s a widespread understanding that the most likely outcome is paperwork and not an actual resolution.