Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco

Let's not make excuses for Chaos City.

"02April2018-SanFrancisco-IMG_6032" by aaron_anderer, CC BY-ND 2.0.

I’ve been writing for a while about how San Francisco is a city both balkanized and atomized. The various neighborhoods and communities largely keep to themselves, and people walk through the streets with their heads down, hoping that when trouble comes it’ll come for somebody else. Well, there could be no more sickening and horrifying demonstration of San Francisco’s social disintegration than the way bystanders refused to help CashApp founder Bob Lee as he bled to death on the streets:

Tragic video shows dying Cash App founder Bob Lee was ignored by bystanders as he begged for help after being stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday…Footage showed Lee lifted his shirt to show [a] driver his two stab wounds — but collapsed to the ground as the car drove off…Lee raised one arm in an attempt to flag down [another] car and jumped back onto his feet, but the driver sped away…Police arrived less than six minutes later and found Lee unconscious with two stab wounds to the chest…He was rushed to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died.

The gruesome murder had the city’s tech community up in arms (Update: An arrest has been made in the case), but it wasn’t even the only prominent incidence of street violence in the city that week.

Local cannabis entrepreneur and former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani was hospitalized after being beaten by two men Wednesday night following an altercation outside his mother’s home in the Marina…Carmignani’s mother had called the police because homeless people were doing drugs outside her door and wouldn’t leave. When no police responded, her son came to talk to the men outside her door and was assaulted.

It seems like every day, we get another story about how the streets of SF are collapsing into chaos. A new Whole Foods in the heart of downtown, which many had heralded as a sign of urban revitalization, just closed down:

A City Hall source told The Standard the company cited deteriorating street conditions around drug use and crime near the grocery store as a reason for its closure…The beleaguered grocery store on Market Street slashed its operating hours due to “high theft” and hostile visitors in October of last year, according to one of the store's managers. And in November, the store enforced new bathroom rules after syringes and pipes were found in the restroom.

The closure is just one of many in the area over the last couple of years. A massive wave of store break-ins was responsible for many of these.

It feels like something is breaking in the city’s politics; people who tolerated this situation for a long time are starting to demand action. Here’s a recent Chamber of Commerce survey:

In this year’s poll, 55 percent [of San Franciscans] said crime was a major issue up from 46 percent in 2021, and more than double the 26 percent in 2020. Overall, 83 percent of respondents told us they felt that crime has gotten worse over the last few years.

But the fully justifiable rage over the violent incidents, store closures and street chaos has been met with a torrent of denial — not just from Twitter shouters, but from some mainstream media outlets as well. Mission Local, the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate, CNN, and ABC were just a few of the outlets who rushed to argue that despite Lee’s murder, San Francisco is actually a safe city.

But those excuses are wearing thin. San Francisco isn’t a dangerous city in the sense that, say, St. Louis or Baltimore is. But it has a unique brand of chaos that makes a great many of its residents justifiably feel insecure walking the streets on a day-to-day basis. And though I don’t think anyone yet knows what the solution is, there’s a growing consensus in the city that something needs to be done.

San Francisco isn’t a bloodbath; it’s chaos

Those who argue that San Francisco is a relatively safe city point to the fact that its murder rate is pretty low in comparison to other American cities, especially big metropolises in the Northeast, South, and Midwest. In fact, even compared to other mid-size cities on the West Coast, SF’s murder rate is not especially high, coming in at 6.53 per 100,000 in 2022, lower than Portland or Denver but higher than San Jose or Sacramento.

Source: AmericanViolence.org

What’s more, unlike many other cities, the murder rate hasn’t really increased much in recent years, and in fact is substantially down since the 2000s.

Source: AmericanViolence.org

Murder rates are a better barometer for violence than overall violent crime rates, because the overall rates are dominated by assaults and robberies that are heavily dependent on reporting. If police decide to go on unofficial strike (as many allege that they have in San Francisco), or if police are understaffed, or if people stop reporting crimes, then overall reported violent crime rates will show a false decline. But pretty much all murders get reported and recorded.

But simply observing these facts about murder rates leaves out a lot of what makes San Francisco feel unsafe to many of its residents. First of all, like most American cities, SF looks much worse in international comparison; London’s murder rate, for example, was just 1.38 in 2022, about one fifth of San Francisco’s. Even Moscow, which was once renowned for its high levels of violence, had a rate of just 4.2 last year — about a third lower than SF. In other words, to call SF a “safe city” is succumb to the soft bigotry of low expectations; Americans have gotten used to having far higher violence levels than the rest of the developed world, but there’s no reason to think this should be a normal and acceptable state of affairs.

And before we go blaming America’s lax gun control laws for SF’s exceptional violence, note that San Jose and Sacramento have much lower murder rates than SF. It’s perfectly reasonable to want SF to be as safe as its nearby California peers.

It’s also possible that one reason SF’s murder rate has stayed low is that people have been going outside less. This was certainly true during the pandemic, and may still be true in downtown due to remote work and the general abandonment of the area. If your risk of getting killed if you go outside increases, but you manage not to get killed by hiding in your home, that doesn’t exactly make you feel safer.

But that being said, I think there are two other major reasons that many San Franciscans don’t feel safe in their city has little to do with how many people actually get killed on the street.

The first is property crime. Despite its low-ish murder rate, SF has one of the highest property crime rates of any city in the nation. Car break-ins are ubiquitous, and seeing thieves stripping car engines on the street is commonplace. The city has suffered from the same wave of retail smash-and-grab thefts common throughout the Bay Area since 2020. There is a steady drumbeat of stories about thieves ransacking businesses, invading homes, and robbing patrons in cafes.

Now, having your car smashed or your store ransacked or your laptop stolen out of your hands usually doesn’t kill you. Only very rarely do you actually die from that. But it’s a constant reminder that you’re at the mercy of men who could do violence to you if they wanted. If you try to keep hold of your precious laptop, will the thief pull out a knife and slash your throat? If you accidentally catch someone smashing your car window, will they use the baseball bat on your head instead? If you try to protect the merchandise of the store that employs you — on which you depend for your very livelihood — will the thief pull out a gun or a knife? And so on. Property crime is scary because it carries with it the threat of violence.

The second reason is the presence of a lot of loud, aggressive, erratic people on the streets. Wally Nowinski (a former guest poster on Noahpinion) described the situation in a recent Twitter thread:

Often, this problem is labeled as “homelessness”, and tough-on-crime people tend to use the word “homeless” to describe the large number of people who stagger around the streets of San Francisco screaming at passers-by. But I think this is a mistake; most actual homeless people trouble nobody, and many of the street screamers may have homes. Abject human misery on the street is horrifying to see, but it isn’t inherently menacing.

What does seem to be commonplace among the street screamers is drugs. San Francisco is awash in methamphetamine (which makes people violent and sometimes psychotic) and fentanyl (which is highly addictive, and may cause violence or psychosis upon withdrawal). Signs of these epidemics are everywhere; needles are everywhere on the streets, and drugs themselves are often discovered just sitting around. A number of downtown areas are basically open-air drug markets.

Streets filled with aggressive, screaming strangers and ubiquitous drug markets usually don’t kill you. But they make many people feel unsafe nonetheless. Could the guy who staggers by you bellowing racial slurs be about to beat you, as Don Carmignani was beaten, or stab you, as Bob Lee was stabbed? Who used the needles lying on the ground in the park where you take your children to play, and will the drugs they used caused them to turn violent? Etc. The threat is especially heightened for the third of SF’s population that’s Asian, given the recent and ongoing wave of unprovoked street attacks on Asian people.

In other words, SF is not a bloodbath like some cities, but it is a place that, for many people, is filled with menace. A combination of rampant property crime, threatening street behavior, and a hard drug epidemic has not produced murder rates on the level of St. Louis or Baltimore, but it turned San Francisco into Chaos City. And the people who downplay and minimize the fear generated by that chaos, especially for old people and women and Asian people, are not helping the situation.

A divided society is a chaotic society

The situation in SF is extremely bad now, but it’s been trending in this direction for years. Why hasn’t something been done already? The answer probably lies in the intricate complexities of San Francisco politics, which as yet mostly lie beyond my grasp. But my basic impression is that this city is deeply divided — divided between the rich old-money White people in the Marina and Pacific Heights and Diamond Heights, the old hippies in the Haight, the gays in the Castro, the middle-class Asians in the Sunset and Richmond, the working-class Latinos in the Mission, the remnants of the old Black population in Bayview and Hunter’s Point, the tech people who work downtown, and so on. There are few common spaces where these groups of San Franciscans come together to experience the city as one; in NYC the subway serves this function, but in SF a lot fewer people use public transit. Each neighborhood of SF thus functions like its own little micro-city, insulated from the rest.

In the past, this has meant that well-to-do San Franciscans were able to ignore violent crime when it didn’t happen in their neighborhoods. The 2000s saw more murders than the 2020s, but they happened mainly in the southeast of the city, and so people elsewhere could ignore them. Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi is absolutely right when he complains that there are many other homicides in the city just as horrifying as Bob Lee’s, and yet went unnoticed:

Most of these [other murder] victims, in fact, were not judged to warrant print or visual news coverage at all. But they had lives and stories, too. Here are their names: 

Gavin Boston, 40; Irving Sanchez-Morales, 28; Carlos Romero Flores, 29; Maxwell Maltzman, 18; Demario Lockett, 44; Maxwell Mason, 29; Humberto Avila, 46; Gregory McFarland, Jr., 36; Kareem Sims, 43; Debra Lynn Hord, 57; and Jermaine Reeves, 52.

These victims’ deaths garnered minimal coverage and little in the way of international outrage, let alone mere acknowledgement on a local level.

The tech industry people now up in arms over Lee’s murder have ignored the rest of the city for too long. But that doesn’t mean the anger over Lee’s death is wrong; it means that tech people ought to know and care about SF’s other victims as well, and use this tragedy as an occasion to build solidarity with the rest of the city.

Fortunately, some of that seems to be happening. GrowSF, a political group backed by tech industry people that was originally dedicated to creating housing abundance, has refocused on the city’s crime problem, and has reached out to build alliances with the city’s Asian population. Last year GrowSF spearheaded the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, the notoriously soft-on-crime DA. Now it may be able to get something done on the crime problem, especially if it can also reach out to Black and Latino communities that are still under disproportionate threat from crime. Meanwhile, San Francisco politicians who called for defunding the police three years ago are now calling for more officers in their districts.

In other words, the chaos that has spread throughout SF’s neighborhoods may eventually create the political conditions for a big push to make the city safer. That push will inevitably be opposed by the city’s so-called “progressive” faction, which has downplayed the significance of property crime and drugs (with one former police commissioner even calling property crimes “basic city life experiences”). And the get-tough-on-crime campaign could be given a bad name by a few overzealous social media loudmouths. But SF “progressives” have a habit of uniting the rest of the city against them and losing elections, and the general populace seems fed up enough to act.

A thornier question is what can actually be done, on a practical level, to make SF safer. The recent Chamber of Commerce poll found that the most popular solutions are basically:

1. putting more police on the streets,

2. enforcing laws against drug dealing, and

3. providing supportive services and treatment for people with (often drug-induced) mental health problems.

Now, in general, we know that putting a ton more cops on the street does tend to reduce crime pretty substantially, both through deterrence and by taking more criminals off the streets. The fact that NYC is the country’s most heavily-policed big city is a big part of the reason why it’s the country’s safest big city. But the SFPD appears to be on some sort of unofficial strike, with traffic stops having basically vanished, and reports of cops standing by and doing nothing about crime being extremely commonplace. Hiring more cops won’t help much if the cops just stand around and do nothing. And the problem with unofficial strikes is that the strikers don’t list their demands, so it’s not clear how to get the SFPD working at maximum efficiency again. The question of “Who will guard the guardians?” comes to mind here — if the cops don’t want to do their jobs, it’s not clear who can make them.

There’s also the problem that the San Francisco DA’s office doesn’t seem to be willing and able to keep repeat offenders — or as police call them, “frequent flyers” — off the streets, despite the removal of Boudin. If arrests go up but don’t lead to jail time, then arrests will have little power to stem the tide of chaos. It’s clear that some crimes, such as store break-ins and anti-Asian attacks, are the work of a small number of incredibly prolific offenders, so it’s not like jailing or imprisoning those folks would mean mass incarceration.

In any case, the obstacles to cleaning up San Francisco’s chaotic streets are another case where the intricacies of urban politics are as yet beyond my detailed understanding. But what is clear is that the problem is real, the city is fed up, and the political will exists to finally do something. The time when San Franciscans had to be ashamed of wanting to get tough on crime is over.

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