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.
Yeah, this is a good point. It seems plausible, even likely, that places with lots of lesser crimes would have fewer of them reported. So maybe SF's car break-in numbers, high as they are, would be even higher with full reporting.
It's hard to know how to account for this, though. How do you measure the ratio of unreported to reported crimes? (Idea stolen from internet troll Ken M: make a list of all the reported crimes, and circle the ones that aren't there.) It also seems plausible that a city like Baltimore, which has a high murder rate but a low property crime rate, might suffer from a similar reporting problem. If a city is racked by murder, a person is probably less likely to bother reporting a car break-in, even if the rates aren't that high. Anyway, if anybody has any bright ideas for accounting for this, I'd love to know them.
I recently read a piece by a law enforcement officer who basically said that these selection bias problems are so inescapable that you kind of have to go with "vibes"; the remark you made about stuff being locked down in the pharmacy being the same sort of example he used, in the sense that you can assume retailers know more than you do about the shoplifting rate, they are incentivized to act on such data but not to publish it, and if they think things need to be locked down or selling isn't profitable to begin with then that gives you an idea of what they found about the local theft rate.
The effect of underreporting on statistics is both overstated (don't report, don't get to file a claim) and doesn't particularly effect the statistical variation you referenced. Unless there is a compelling argument for why people started underreporting in the last year then you have to assume that the amount of underreporting remains constant as a percentage. Literally every time there's an adjustment to the negative in SF there are lots of folks claiming that it's that people stopped calling the police, and whenever crime goes up we gotta recall the DA. None of it is factual or data driven.
Yeah, I was going to point this out. In a year of living in Denver, my car was broken into 4 times, and there was nothing of value any of those times. I didn't report any of them, and replaced the windows out of pocket because I don't trust my insurance company not to red flag me or jack up rates.
Did I report any of those times? Nope. Denver cops would have just laughed at me, had me fill out some paperwork, then thrown that paperwork away. Why would I waste several hours of my life for that?
And it was a real problem too - one of the times, a whole street of street-parked cars had their windows broken along with mine, and some other folk on that street said it happened a couple times a month when I was dealing with it. That's conservatively $20k of damages a month, every month, for basically nothing. Do the Denver cops care or do anything? One guess. Similar dynamic in SF.
>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’.
>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.
This may be naive, but my impression is that violent crime is more concentrated, and is basically avoidable if you stay in the safer parts of town. E.g. Detroit may have a high murder rate but my impression is that those murders are concentrated among a racial/income/geographic strata I wouldn't fall in, so it wouldn't be an issue for me if I was to be in Detroit. Not being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a reasonable strategy.
My impression of San Francisco is that property time is everywhere and you can't avoid it, cars apartments etc. are constantly getting broken into, you can't have any expectation of your fellow citizens subscribing to the same social contract of "don't commit random property crimes". That seems horrific to me, and much worse than a slightly higher murder rate in another part of a city that I would simply never go to. I would much rather live in Detroit than San Francisco.
As an experiment I googled "Detroit Murder" and recent stories are a breakup revenge arson, a random freeway shooting, a confusing self defense home invasion shooting, a domestic dispute shooting, a gang war shooting, and another domestic dispute shooting. Frankly the only one that I think could happen to me is the freeway shooting which had no motive listed, so I don't think Detroit's murder rate necessarily tells the full story from the perspective of somebody reading this blog.
I disagree. SF as people experience it, IS unsafe.
There are 3 reasons I do not see mentioned. Transit corridors, Empty Streets and Oakland.
A city is held together by its transit corridor. And SF's transit is nonexistent once you go west of Japantown. Therefore, to most people, SF is lies to the east of the divisadero boundary. Mission, Tenderloin, Soma, Civic Center and Downtown are how people experience SF. These neighborhoods that form the spine of the city & its transit corridor are held hostage by the addicted, like no other city. In comparison, NYC does not require you to go to the Bronx, Times Square or Brownsville. A Boston doesn't usually interact with mass-n-cass or Roxbury either. If SF's drug problem was in Daly city, then no one would notice.
Most cities offer safety in numbers & SF is a sleepy city. The streets empty out by 8pm, with not many people seen walking. SF (and Seattle Downtown) are the only 2 places where I've frequently found myself alone with a bunch of addicts, being followed or accosted. I'm a big-tall man who's only lived in big cities, and it still scares me. Can't imagine how scary it feels to a random woman. While we are at it, let’s also talk about just the sheer level of ‘zombification’ seen on the streets here. I have lived in some pretty gnarly 3rd world places, and SF’s addicts are beyond anything I’ve ever seen.
Lastly, SF's crime rate is artificially low, because SF's poor do not live in SF. Gang related crimes, domestic violence, rape & violent skirmishes are commonly seen in poor neighborhoods. NYC's poor live within the boundaries of NYC. Seattle & Boston’s poor famously live in the city, while the rich live just outside. Cities in Red States are strategically gerrymandered to keep all the high crime areas within city limits. SF’s poor live in Oakland. Look, To many people, Oakland is more SF than many neighborhoods of SF itself. And it really doesn’t help that Oakland is synonymous with crime.
There are tons of neighborhoods in SF that feel as safe as a rich suburb. However, those neighborhoods also have the connectivity and affordability of a rich suburb, defeating the purpose of living in a city.
For what it's worth, murder rates are widely used by criminologists as authoritative information. It's very hard for a homicide to not be reported. Rape, conversely, is incredibly easy for police to not recognize or discourage the reporting of, and I think that the recorded rate of rape is not a particularly good guide to the rate of rape in the city.
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.
Yeah, this is a good point. It seems plausible, even likely, that places with lots of lesser crimes would have fewer of them reported. So maybe SF's car break-in numbers, high as they are, would be even higher with full reporting.
It's hard to know how to account for this, though. How do you measure the ratio of unreported to reported crimes? (Idea stolen from internet troll Ken M: make a list of all the reported crimes, and circle the ones that aren't there.) It also seems plausible that a city like Baltimore, which has a high murder rate but a low property crime rate, might suffer from a similar reporting problem. If a city is racked by murder, a person is probably less likely to bother reporting a car break-in, even if the rates aren't that high. Anyway, if anybody has any bright ideas for accounting for this, I'd love to know them.
Sounds like someone can try a poll of "1. How many crimes of type X have you been a victim of in the last 12 months? 2. How many have you reported?"
It won't be 100 percent accurate for sure, but it would give *some* figure for the percent of unreported crimes.
I recently read a piece by a law enforcement officer who basically said that these selection bias problems are so inescapable that you kind of have to go with "vibes"; the remark you made about stuff being locked down in the pharmacy being the same sort of example he used, in the sense that you can assume retailers know more than you do about the shoplifting rate, they are incentivized to act on such data but not to publish it, and if they think things need to be locked down or selling isn't profitable to begin with then that gives you an idea of what they found about the local theft rate.
The effect of underreporting on statistics is both overstated (don't report, don't get to file a claim) and doesn't particularly effect the statistical variation you referenced. Unless there is a compelling argument for why people started underreporting in the last year then you have to assume that the amount of underreporting remains constant as a percentage. Literally every time there's an adjustment to the negative in SF there are lots of folks claiming that it's that people stopped calling the police, and whenever crime goes up we gotta recall the DA. None of it is factual or data driven.
Yeah, I was going to point this out. In a year of living in Denver, my car was broken into 4 times, and there was nothing of value any of those times. I didn't report any of them, and replaced the windows out of pocket because I don't trust my insurance company not to red flag me or jack up rates.
Did I report any of those times? Nope. Denver cops would have just laughed at me, had me fill out some paperwork, then thrown that paperwork away. Why would I waste several hours of my life for that?
And it was a real problem too - one of the times, a whole street of street-parked cars had their windows broken along with mine, and some other folk on that street said it happened a couple times a month when I was dealing with it. That's conservatively $20k of damages a month, every month, for basically nothing. Do the Denver cops care or do anything? One guess. Similar dynamic in SF.
>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’.
>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.
This may be naive, but my impression is that violent crime is more concentrated, and is basically avoidable if you stay in the safer parts of town. E.g. Detroit may have a high murder rate but my impression is that those murders are concentrated among a racial/income/geographic strata I wouldn't fall in, so it wouldn't be an issue for me if I was to be in Detroit. Not being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a reasonable strategy.
My impression of San Francisco is that property time is everywhere and you can't avoid it, cars apartments etc. are constantly getting broken into, you can't have any expectation of your fellow citizens subscribing to the same social contract of "don't commit random property crimes". That seems horrific to me, and much worse than a slightly higher murder rate in another part of a city that I would simply never go to. I would much rather live in Detroit than San Francisco.
As an experiment I googled "Detroit Murder" and recent stories are a breakup revenge arson, a random freeway shooting, a confusing self defense home invasion shooting, a domestic dispute shooting, a gang war shooting, and another domestic dispute shooting. Frankly the only one that I think could happen to me is the freeway shooting which had no motive listed, so I don't think Detroit's murder rate necessarily tells the full story from the perspective of somebody reading this blog.
I disagree. SF as people experience it, IS unsafe.
There are 3 reasons I do not see mentioned. Transit corridors, Empty Streets and Oakland.
A city is held together by its transit corridor. And SF's transit is nonexistent once you go west of Japantown. Therefore, to most people, SF is lies to the east of the divisadero boundary. Mission, Tenderloin, Soma, Civic Center and Downtown are how people experience SF. These neighborhoods that form the spine of the city & its transit corridor are held hostage by the addicted, like no other city. In comparison, NYC does not require you to go to the Bronx, Times Square or Brownsville. A Boston doesn't usually interact with mass-n-cass or Roxbury either. If SF's drug problem was in Daly city, then no one would notice.
Most cities offer safety in numbers & SF is a sleepy city. The streets empty out by 8pm, with not many people seen walking. SF (and Seattle Downtown) are the only 2 places where I've frequently found myself alone with a bunch of addicts, being followed or accosted. I'm a big-tall man who's only lived in big cities, and it still scares me. Can't imagine how scary it feels to a random woman. While we are at it, let’s also talk about just the sheer level of ‘zombification’ seen on the streets here. I have lived in some pretty gnarly 3rd world places, and SF’s addicts are beyond anything I’ve ever seen.
Lastly, SF's crime rate is artificially low, because SF's poor do not live in SF. Gang related crimes, domestic violence, rape & violent skirmishes are commonly seen in poor neighborhoods. NYC's poor live within the boundaries of NYC. Seattle & Boston’s poor famously live in the city, while the rich live just outside. Cities in Red States are strategically gerrymandered to keep all the high crime areas within city limits. SF’s poor live in Oakland. Look, To many people, Oakland is more SF than many neighborhoods of SF itself. And it really doesn’t help that Oakland is synonymous with crime.
There are tons of neighborhoods in SF that feel as safe as a rich suburb. However, those neighborhoods also have the connectivity and affordability of a rich suburb, defeating the purpose of living in a city.
“Transit is nonexistent once you go west of Japantown”? The 38 Geary is the busiest bus line west of the Mississippi.
And the N Judah is the busiest transit line in the city overall.
For what it's worth, murder rates are widely used by criminologists as authoritative information. It's very hard for a homicide to not be reported. Rape, conversely, is incredibly easy for police to not recognize or discourage the reporting of, and I think that the recorded rate of rape is not a particularly good guide to the rate of rape in the city.