[ajross]

But they're not about safety! And the author (and presumably you too?) admit as much. Again, aren't we supposed to be better than arguing about policy issues via reference to our personal emotions? Isn't that what the woke hippies on the school board are doing?

[yuliyp]

That's a pretty big stretch to claim that everything related to emotion is equally suspect. Safety is something which naturally has a very strong perception element to it. A lack of a feeling of safety causes people to change their behavior in ways which tend to destroy a community (by moving away, avoiding public spaces, not shopping in certain areas, etc). Those harms to the community are tangible. Dismissing them because they don't show up in violent crime statistics is choosing to ignore reality.

[ajross]

> That's a pretty big stretch to claim that everything related to emotion is equally suspect.

The context is an emotional argument that is directly and explicitly contradicted by data. Yeah, I'd say that's suspect. Do you really disagree? "Facts don't care about your feelings", as it were.

Instead, what we're seeing in this subthread is a bunch of pontification about how the data is measuring the wrong thing or how feelings are important all by themselves. Which is fine. But none of that makes living in SF dangerous when it isn't, so an argument about SF based on safety problems is... just plain wrong.