Two weeks ago, tech executive Bob Lee was stabbed to death in downtown San Francisco. Damn. Extremely sad.
Perfect time to let the narrative talkboxes begin:
Techies like Musk began by spinning it as: “Bob was killed. SF is dangerous!”. But then one week later, we learned that Bob was killed by a fellow tech exec. So the Lefties came in and said: “Ha! Techies just spin narratives. SF is safe!”
We shouldn’t build our world on the sand of narratives. So which is it? Is SF safe or not?
Obviously, we need to do a simple thing—look at the data.
Here’s what it shows:
First, we need to distinguish between violent crime and property crime.
For violent crime, SF is right in the middle of the pack. 715 crimes per 100,000 people (per year). A bit fewer than 1 in 1000 people are victims of violent crime each year.
SF is roughly 2x safer than Oakland and 3x safer than Detroit. It’s 2x more dangerous than San Jose though. Here are the top 20 US cities by population, sorted by violent crime (in red). San Francisco is in the middle.
If we look at just property crime, SF jumps to the top. (Behind Albuquerque for some reason?)
If we look at total crime (violent + property), we see that San Francisco stays near the top with roughly 7,000 crimes per 100,000 people. In SF, a bit fewer than 1 in 100 people are victims of any crime each year. 2x worse than LA and 3x worse than NYC.
So that’s the data. SF is safe-ish for people but not for property. Unfortunately, I saw very little media coverage with a graph. Just text and narrative.
In a healthier information ecosystem, the media would not have updated either way when we learned that Bob was (or was not) murdered by a fellow techie.
Of course, from the perspective of Bob’s friends and family, everything can and should matter about his case. But from the perspective of “the state”, “the people”, and “progress”, the specifics here don’t really matter. It’s one of 6300 violent crimes per year (56 of which are murders). All of them are bad.
What matters is the overall rate and whether we’re making progress on that.
SF is already average on violent crime. It should try to decrease violent crime even 2x more! Get down to San Jose levels.
But SF should be a bit ashamed of its property crime rate and should try to decrease it at least 2x to the level of a city like LA.
Before we even start to have a conversation about what to do (increase community investment vs. increase policing), we need to agree on where we are now (average violent crime rates, bad property crime rates) and where we want to go (2x decrease in crime rates in the next 3 years).
And then we need to be serious about getting there.
- Rhys
P.S. At a bare minimum, I shouldn’t need to create these graphs myself. We need Our World In Data at the city level.
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