Is it possible that the amount of assault is relatively unrelated to total ridership? Like the number of criminal assholes in the community is about the same regardless of how many people use mass transit?
Right, people with small statures who look like pushovers will face a disproportionate amount of the abuse. Big mean looking guys like me usually don't have much to fear, but why should anybody have to put up with it just because they're small and meek?
I don't think it's victim blaming, it's a valid point.
Are you more likely to be shot on the streets of Chicago compared to Boise? Probably, yes, however you're MUCH more likely to get shot on the streets of Chicago if you're involved in gang related activities.
There are probably similar qualifiers for assault on the BART.
Nobody is saying that there are no random assaults, they are saying that without data on what percentage of the attacks were completely random, we can't make assumptions that an increase in total number of assaults equates to an increase in total number of random assaults.
I suspect so. I think in large part (but not all) the perception that San Francisco has gotten more unsafe since the pandemic is because our horrific social problems are now even more visible with fewer crowds around.
I suspect this is exactly the phenomena in action. You've got a relatively constant-sized population of deranged individuals who ride the trains a lot. When there's a lot of people on the train, they disappear into t.