[s5300]

Where exactly is this war zone in California...?

Growing up in the sticks I'd heard so much about it and had hilariously low expectations when I went out for an internship, but then I found out that it's a fucking amazing place. I swear there's got to be a decades long campaign to make outsiders think the place is terrible in an attempt to keep density down. Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy if so. Don't want my paragliding ocean bluffs overpacked with people. :P

[InvertedRhodium]

While I agree that the other poster was being a bit dramatic, it's no stretch to say that California performs objectively poorer in a number of areas that people tend to pay attention to. Just take one crime - the murder rates in California are 4.3 per 100,000 and only 0.8 in Australia.

I can see why some people could see a 450% increase in the likelihood of being murdered as a comparitive warzone.

[DubiousPusher]

> the murder rates in California are 4.3 per 100,000 and only 0.8 in Australia.

But isn't that true of most of the U.S. We have more crime everywhere than most the rest of the world. And especially violent crime.

[ALittleLight]

Looks like (from a quick googling, may be something I'm not taking into account here) violent crime is actually more common in Australia than in California.

Australia 692 violent assaults per 100k [1]

California 430 assaults per 100k [2]

So, you'd also be trading more of a rare really bad thing for less of a relatively common bad thing.

1 - https://www.osac.gov/Country/Australia/Content/Detail/Report....

2 - https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/....

[InvertedRhodium]

An obvious flaw is that it's comparing an entire country to a singular (and disporoprotionately wealthy) state. If you expanded the rate to America in general the violent crime rate is around 800 per 100k, and if you reduced "Australia" to "New South Wales" then you also see a similar drop - but the site doesn't provide an easy to consume summary.

The web app doesn't seem to support direct linking to query results, but it's in here: http://crimetool.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/bocsar/ under Assault - Non Domestic.

At the end of the day though - people tend to consider being murdered a significantly more disruptive event than getting punched in the face.

[nostromo]

> An obvious flaw is that it's comparing an entire country to a singular state.

California has a much larger population and twice the economic output of Australia. It seems much more reasonable to compare Australia to one state than to compare it to the entire US.

[nsonha]

but the characteristics of your immediate living zones are not comparable. Sydney and San Fran would be comparable regardless of their populations

[ALittleLight]

Why would you compare it to the US? The US has an order of magnitude more people. California is comparable in population. The right thing to do would be to compare the locales where you would spend time in each place, e.g. the violent crime rate in your neighborhood or would-be neighborhood matters most, then city, and maybe state.

[bigfudge]

That assumes assaults in the US are reported the same way. Murders probably are because there is a body. I doubt I her crime is given the weird incentives in the US system.

[femiagbabiaka]

This is one case in which crime metrics are completely useless for getting an image of what it actually “feels” like to live in a city. American cities are incredibly segregated by economic and racial class. Crime is everywhere, but largely centered in a few especially poor areas. Outside of the core economic centers (and I’m talking neighborhoods), large swaths of the people who work and live in SF are living predictable and safe lives.

[alfiedotwtf]

I replied above, but read this whole page. Like wtf do places like this exist in America?! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles

[deminature]

Market St in SF is what most Australians see when attending conferences. The homelessness, human waste, open drug use, and visibly serious mental illness is pretty confronting for anyone not used to it, and that's at daytime - it gets significantly scarier at night if you make the mistake of walking back to your hotel. I've never understood why all the hotels international guests stay in are in by far the worst neighborhood.

[DubiousPusher]

It's grodey and depressing but hardly a "war zone".

[deminature]

Last time I was there, someone was openly defecating in front of city hall, next to multiple people shooting heroin. I had to step over someone who had collapsed apparently from drug use, in front of a restaurant entrance, and nobody seemed to care. It's about as close to the third world as exists in the west. I recognize there's extremely nice parts of SF, but most out of state/international guests stay around Tenderloin/SOMA and would never know that.

[alfiedotwtf]

I stayed in Tenderloin and was shocked when walking back to hotel people having sex on the footpath in front of their tent, while a few tents down someone shooting up. Then what looked like a 14 year old (at most) prostitute soliciting at the corner.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the depths of the Philippines, and never saw anything that bad... and that was during a single stroll to the hotel!

[InvertedRhodium]

I'm not sure if you appreciate how utterly surreal that visage is to someone who is 3 hours off a flight from Sydney.

It honestly feels like a scaled down version of the slums you see in South Africa butting right up against typical suburban homes.

[DubiousPusher]

Sure I do. I'm from picturesque, rural Montana. My first visit to LA in the 90s was quite shocking. But a war zone implies a level of lawlessness that doesn't apply. Most of what is going on, people using drugs, using the bathroom on the street, etc, it isn't good but it doesn't really affect you. In a war zone, you have high odds of being maimed or killed any second for no good reason. It's a poor analogy. I think the homelessness is a problem we need to desperately to address but this kind of militant rhetoric doesn't help at all. In fact for several decades here it has made things worse.

[ironmagma]

People in San Francisco will threaten you with violence just for wearing a nice-looking jacket. Nothing about that is healthy.

[anonymoushn]

I lived near 5th and Market and walked to a tech company I love very much near Giants Stadium. This is a short walk. One place I regularly walked by was the site of a random slaying by a person who had been released from prison after being arrested for randomly assaulting people in the same place years before.

[flukus]

> Where exactly is this war zone in California...?

No idea how universal these things are in all of California, but nearly every Australian that visits LA and a few other areas come back with stories about hearing gunshots from the hotel, accidentally ending up in a seedy/crime ridden part of town or something similar. This is very alien to us and more in line with what we'd see on the news from Somalia. Statistics like homicide rates and gun crime show there's at least some truth it.

We're also a fairly egalitarian society, so much more likely to judge other nations on how well off the poorest are and not the richest.

[rxhernandez]

I have lived in LA county for more than 25 years and lived in East Hollywood ~1 year. I have never heard gunfire anywhere in LA. I'm sure it happens in the worst areas but I've never heard it and I've been around plenty of recreational gunfire (outside of LA).

Do you think it's possible they're mistaking gunfire with fireworks? There are plenty of fireworks here.

[alfiedotwtf]

> I'm sure it happens in the worst areas

I think the fact that those areas exist comes as a shock to Australians, who are used to gun control and probably never heard let alone seen a single gun in their lifetime

[monkeycantype]

The poster was being hyperbolic. I love California, but as on outsider I didn’t have the sense of which areas were or weren’t dangerous, and to be honest just couldn’t read it, and got myself into dangerous situations. That would never happen in Australia because I can read people and places in ways, and it surprises me that this is true, that I seemed to be culturally blind to in the US. I’m still confused about Compton, to my eyes it read as an easy going middle class neighborhood, is it? - was Dre exaggerating all this time? . In both LA and Oakland (where I mostly lived) there were nights where there was extended gunfire. To be honest this happens in Australia too, but I assume that it’s people out hunting. Oh hang on - I take that back the Proudlock brothers used to shoot each other with air rifles.

[femiagbabiaka]

sssshhhhhh