A Safer San Francisco

Ps - I coorganize a software engineer meetup here. We’ve got good representation!

What I do believe I see is a strong relationship between reactionary/GOP political messaging and what is repeated about cities. The Republican National Convention's focus was the 'chaos' in cities, IIRC, though few noticed because other issues dominated. Reactionary messaging seems inredibly effective; whatever they say, people of all stripes are soon repeating. The emotionally intense, repetitive style also seems to match it - I don't see many reasoned arguments.

It can absolutely be self-fulfilling. Perception is reality. Look at many Americans worried about crime in cities, while crime is low and dropping. Homicides (a small portion) are up, but all over the place, not cities in particular. (Source: Recent FBI/DoJ report.) I live in a place with low crime, yet people say they are leaving because of it.

> A lot of the companies that ... went to Miami due to politics will never go back.

As of a few months ago, most people leaving SF went to the greater Bay Area, next elsewhere in CA, next the state of Washington.

Most companies go to SF for politics (or policy), but it's the norm and therefore unremakrable. You don't see a lot of leading companies outside the leading cities, maybe for a reason. Politics, especially when one group advocates ignorance, hate, and disrupting the rule of law, correlates with intelligent policy. Also, most people don't like living around ignorance, hate, and chaos.

I also think it's over-hasty to attribute many of these things to Breed's policies. Companies in knowledge industries going remote isn't a unique-to-SF thing, and the housing prices and street problems that caused many people to leave the city are rooted in bad housing policy that long predates her mayoral term.

> About two-thirds of those who left San Francisco last year stayed in the 11-county Bay Area economic region, according to the same California Policy Lab study. About 80 percent stayed in California.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2021/07/08/uc-repor...

Now, certainly things are not going to go back to the way they were once we start pulling out of the pandemic (whenever that will be). But they will go some part of the way back. I don't think it's easy to predict exactly where things will be in 1, 2, or 5 years. Maybe what comes will be enough, maybe it won't. I'm betting that things will work out just fine. There will be some budget shortfalls, and some strife, but life will go on, and the city will rebound, just like most/all of the other cities in the world will.

Frankly I don't care why Breed just now feels like she needs to clean up the city, but I'm glad it's happening, finally.

I’m out, I’d never recommend anyone do business in SF. Time and again I’ve seen the same bad behavior when I interact with any department (I once spent a week in the planning office— every day with revised plans, ultimately rejected not because of anything being incorrect but because, and I quote “I don’t like the drawings”). SF city government is run by a bunch of entitled pretentious pricks on arbitrary power trips and no regard for the people they ostensibly represent and serve.

I’m not surprised in the least that they can’t figure out how to provide basic safety for their citizens and businesses, or that they’ve lost entire regions to lawlessness.

If you want meaningful change first audit the funds disbursement of organizations which allegedly exist to aid the homeless of SF. You may be shocked to discover what is actually happening.

They’re there because of drug and mental health issues.

In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized.

On the flip side, in countries with mass poverty issues and mass homelessness - the slums aren’t necessarily a place of rampant and constant drug usage. (You still see grinding poverty and families on the street, but it’s different)

The Tenderloin was like that in the 1990s. Same with SOMA, the Lower Haight, 6th and Market, and other parts of the city as well but those were places I frequented often enough to have seen it myself.

They seemed puzzled, as if I came from a small town and wasn't used to life in a big city. I've moved to SF from NYC. Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Mid-pandemic NYC at 2am felt safer than pre-pandemic SF on a Monday morning.

I live in the Dogpatch and it is amazing here, ditto for most of Potrero Hill. I do occasionally see a small number of homeless people about, but nothing particularly threatening, and I don't see trash and needles and whatnot everywhere. I go out nearly daily. I stay closer to home these days, since there's plenty to do in my neighborhood, and I feel like I've gotten a bit more insular since the pandemic began.

And yeah, when I do venture out farther for dinners & drinks, well... it depends. Parts of the Mission have gotten really bad (they've been bad for many years, but have been getting worse). Parts of North Beach aren't great. Ten years ago I would cut through the Tenderloin on foot when walking places, but I would definitely not do that today, especially after dark. I used to live in Soma, and it got pretty bad there too. I felt unsafe at times, and that's part of why I moved. (And I didn't even live in the worst areas around mid-Market.)

But consider places like the (inner) Sunset, Richmond, Lower Pac Heights, Bernal, Glen Park, Balboa Park, most of Japantown. They're... fine? A lot of these neighborhoods have reputations for being sleepy, but if you're content to make a night just at one restaurant followed by one bar, you can have a great time. If you want to do a bar crawl or see some serious nightlife, sure, you're going to have to go to the Mission, Nob Hill, Haight, Lower Haight, North Beach, Marina, the south-of-Geary Divis corridor, etc., and yeah, some of those places can feel varying degrees of unsafe at times, depending on where you are. That's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.

But this narrative that SF is just chock full of homeless people shooting up, with spent needles, trash, and human shit on the streets and sidewalks everywhere... no, that's just not my experience over the 11+ years I've lived here. No neighborhood is perfect, but these particular problems are nowhere near as widespread as some people make it sound.

> I'm against the culture of mass incarceration but not prosecuting thefts below $950 isn't the answer. [...] There's no simple answer here. There are lots of contributing factors. But pretty high on that list is income inequality and housing unaffordability.

I'm in full agreement with you here. I think some of the crime is driven by opportunism (if the cops won't even investigate, there's low risk), but a lot is driven by desperation and feelings of powerlessness. We need to get everyone in secure housing, get people with mental health and/or addiction issues the help they need, and somehow let people feel financially secure enough without having to work 3 jobs and 100 hours a week.

This is already illegal in California - banned as of 2018 under the California Fair Chance Act. Through companies can still conduct background checks after extending offers.

One of these is not like the others.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

The list goes on. There's a lot that can be done. Increasing policing and cracking down on drugs have both proven to be damaging, but it's the only thing the uncompassionate and out-of-touch know how to do in response to problems they refuse to address.

Those tech workers are never coming back, it doesn't matter what SF does.

I'm uncomfortable about loosening the surveillance statutes, though. Accessing random private business surveillance feeds should require a warrant. And I don't want government CCTV everywhere, period.

No one is putting any thought into the root causes of why petty theft is occurring. When you're addicted to drugs you need to use every day which costs money. You need even more money if you find yourself in debt, say to someone who gave you some drugs when you couldn't pay. No surprise that someone that needs a few bucks badly might rifle through a globe box for something to sell or steal from a store.

Creating a safe supply of prescribed drugs breaks up the entire cycle. No dealers to get indebted to, and accordingly no one to have to steal for. With affordable housing and supports, the driving reasons to commit survival petty thefts disappear. Sure there will probably be some people that continue to steal for extra cash, but at this point you've shrunk the problem down which gives police more of an ability to deal with the real trouble makers, the people that aren't stealing merely to survive.

It's wild that people are pointing the lack of prosecutions of theft under $1000 as the problem. Throwing the book at people committing these trivial thefts is the most costly and least effective approach. I suppose jailing people for petty theft makes the problem "disappear" but only until that person is released. Who wants to pay the enormous expense to lock up everyone? Not me.

It seems like if they repeat anything enough - anything - eventually people of all political stripes take it as assumed fact.

In my city, car theft has become so rampant that a whole new subreddit has emerged specifically to track stolen cars here. Groups of citizens with guns sometimes organize on Facebook to go reclaim stolen vehicles from homeless encampments. Catalytic converter theft is also rampant. My street has been hit multiple times. Our shared mailboxes have been broken into over and over again. Stores in my neighborhood routinely experience break-ins and thefts. Shootings are through the roof. In October 2019, there were 28 shootings in my city. In October 2020, there were 88, and in October 2021 there were 129.

Sometimes, when the thermometer reads 98.6, it’s because the patient is healthy. But sometimes, it’s because the thermometer is broken.

Here’s one article on the spike (but there are lots, from different sources and regions): https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/crime-rate-in-san-franci...

I don't think that's right. That facial recognition bill was largely for show. Since 2006 San Francisco has had strict limitations on the placement of public-facing surveillance cameras by the city. They're virtually unheard of. There are exceptions, but as far as I can tell cameras have mostly dwindled further since shortly after the original legislation as each successive administration became less inclined to even try to seek permission to install a camera somewhere. The biggest exception by far, and also relatively recent (2016, AFAICT), was permitting the use of police body cameras.

Because there are so few city surveillance cameras, the police created a program to work with businesses and homeowners to make it easier to access their security footage. But as mentioned by Breed, in 2019 the city passed a law to limit that as well.

Anyhow, so long as people are wearing masks then facial recognition doesn't provide any benefit, presuming it even could.

You are minutes away from the beach, and mountains.

A lot of the jobs are union.

I've been to a lot of cities, and none compare to SF.

As to the homeless. It's everywhere. America is not what it used to be. I don't care where I go--there's a homeless problem.

The police force needs an enema though. I would like to see a top down firing. It's been terrible for years. They need social workers instead of harassment, They need to lower ridiculous traffic fines though, but every town has been slowly raising fees/fines. I would like to see all nepotism in city hiring stopped.

San Francisco is going nowhere. It will just get more popular once the Covid problem is abated.

Oh yea, if you are a SF resident, and have a sick pet, you will never find a more reasonable vet than their SPCA.