[awb]

Here are some crime stats for the top 100 US cities from 2019:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

SF had similar crime rates to Miami, Corpus Cristi, TX, Mesa, AZ, Austin, TX and Chesapeake, VA.

And about 1/3 the crime rate of the worst cities: Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis and Memphis.

Of course, individual neighborhoods and streets might be highly variable.

But as far as the 100 biggest cities go, SF seems slightly worse than average. I counted 38 cities with worse crime rates and 4 that didn’t fully report. So putting it somewhere around 39th or 43rd on the highest crime rates for the 100 biggest cities.

[specialp]

That is overall crime rate. If you look at the things random people are most likely going to be impacted by like property crimes you will see that SF is near or at the top. Also in many cities there are the areas where violent crime is high, but it is primarily gang violence back and forth with each other. These are weighed in the overall statistics.

For someone walking to work, getting their property taken, and aggressive harassment that is not reported in crime statistics makes them feel unsafe. The quality of life issues that SF has and are not in official crime statistics are what are making people feel that their city is a dump and they loathe walking down these streets. Human excrement, aggressive pan handlers, petty larceny through the roof, and pervasive open drug use.

[dionidium]

It's notoriously difficult to make region-to-region comparisons using city crime data, so much so that the FBI explicitly warns against it on their crime-reporting website. [0]

The problem is that things change a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood -- the worst neighborhoods for crime are much worse than the best neighborhoods for crime. Second, municipal boundaries are mostly historical accidents; cities don't stop at their borders. Some cities draw their borders to include almost their entire surrounding region; others (like San Francisco) include a very tiny portion of their region. Depending on where the crime in the region happens to be, this can make a big difference. Why is Brooklyn part of NYC, but Jersey isn't? Why is Oakland not part of San Francisco, but Queens is part of NYC? Why are all the old inner-ring suburbs in Chicago a part of Chicago-proper, while none of the old inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis are part of St. Louis-proper?

These are just historical accidents that don't matter much if you're a human being walking around, but they have huge impacts on how statistics are compiled in each region.

So, OK, say you solve that problem by only looking at MSAs or "urbanized areas" so that you can normalize the comparison between "cities." That solves the problem, right?

Does it?

You still have the issue that you might be comparing one region with a relatively high rate of crime spread across its entire footprint to another city that has sky-high rates of crime in 5 neighborhoods and is relatively safe everywhere else. Which city has "higher" crime? Can you tell just by looking at its region-wide per-capita crime rates? Is that even a question statistics can answer, or is it philosophy? (See: the old joke about Bill Gates walking into a coffeeshop and drastically raising the average income of everybody inside.)

It's a hard problem.

[0] I see now that someone else already posted the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958622

[awb]

Yes, agreed that it's a hard problem, bordering on philosophy. Feeling safe, is a unique individual experience that won't show up in the data.

But in response to the claim from the article that "SF is not safe", I don't know a better way to analyze the claim that crime stats, even though it's imperfect for all the reasons you mentioned.

[alanh]

Everyone knows that crime stats are very misleading because

1) The DA is simply not prosecuting lots of crime, and downgrading many prosecutions (felonies prosecuted as misdemeanors or not at all), and

2) Due to above and a general perception that most crimes aren’t prosecuted, dramatically fewer reports are filed at all

[awb]

What’s a better metric?

Anecdata and eye witness reporting can be misleading too.

[kube-system]

The UCR is not really great data for ranking cities.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

There are unquestionably different attitudes towards crime, enforcement, and reporting when comparing SF to other cities.

[awb]

Good points. I don’t know of anyone has done the kind of deep analysis they’re advocating for though.

As a broad brush, I still think it’s fair to say in 2019 SF was around the middle of the pack for the top 100 cities in terms of reported crime per 100k known people.

[kansface]

Crime is systematically underreported in SF compared to other cities, except for murder I’d guess.

[awb]

How do you know this?