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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

> Crime in almost every category has gone down over the last decade.

This isn't true at all. Since prop 47, property crime has exploded across the state. Even violent crime rates are significantly higher in LA than they were in 2010.[2][3] In particular gang-on-gang violence may be moving the homicide rate lower, but predator-on-prey violence has shot up. Rapes have more than doubled in the past decade.

> From Seattle to Los Angeles, a “shoplifting boom” is hitting major retailers, which deal with thousands of thefts, drug overdoses, and assaults each year. Since 2010, thefts increased by 22 percent in Portland, 50 percent in San Francisco, and 61 percent in Los Angeles

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/west-coast-shoplifting-boom [2] http://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr02.php [3] https://abc7.com/murder-los-angeles-crime-covid/7185695/

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> Rapes have more than doubled in the past decade.

Do you have any source that states that this increase is actually due to more crimes taking place, rather than more victims reporting rapes due to shifting attitudes and/or less fear of societal rebuke? It could very well have been under-reported in the past due to stigma and other reasons.

These kind of societal factors can often affect the number of reported rapes more than the actual crime rate does. And we absolutely know that the attitude toward sexual violence and misconduct has changed a lot in the last decade. So it is reasonable to believe that this had had some effect on the increase of reported sexual violence, especially since most other violent crime has had sharp declines.

Summary of the provided source for people scrolling past:

Since 2010, homicide had a 21% decrease, robbery a 14% decrease, aggravated assault a 25% increase, and rape a 94% increase.

The contrast is even more sharp when looking 20 years back:

Since 2000, homicide had a 52% decrease, robbery a 35% decrease, aggravated assault a 47% decrease, and rape a 41% increase.

If you want to distort the statistics, you can do this the other direction, too. It's common for people in Seattle to point out that they don't file police reports for theft because it's a bunch of work waiting on the police to arrive (it can take hours) and filling out a police report only for the police/prosecutors/judges to literally do nothing about it. So anecdotally, people say property crime is underreported.

Also, police departments and mayors have every incentive to keep reported crime lower. The LAPD, for instance, has a history of underclassifying crimes to maintain appearances that their city was safe: https://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-lapd-reclass-20141...

Also, the OP specifically pointed to 10-year statistics, not 20. Isn't it at all concerning that we're erasing all the progress we've made over the course of decades?

https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/... is great for this, and separates arrests and crimes and covers the entire state, not just LA/SF.

Property arrests and crimes are actually down, while violent crime has increased.

Interestingly, just as a comparison, Texas has as many rapes despite having somewhere around 10M less people.[1]

1. https://www.dps.texas.gov/crimereports/19/cit2019.pdf

Crime has been coming down after prop 47 passed. This is such a common myth that I put the data into google sheets for these discussions.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QgrfJvfa8XaVm0MEfU4j...

You're looking at arrest data, not incident data. Very likely arrests are down because police deprioritized non-felony crimes post prop 47.

And then the bar of criminal charges for theft is getting higher and higher. In San Francisco nobody is getting bothered by a "criminal according to old stat rules" going through a row of parked cars smashing windows and grabbing everything in plain sight anymore. Not even arrest record would show up in modern stats. We are totally safe these days

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