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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

You can't have reliable stats when your government completely ignores some crimes, redefines them as noncrimes, doesn't send the police, doesn't arrest, drops charges immediately, or gives you a slap on the wrist instead of a proper sentence.

There are however ways that don't depend on the government. For instance, videos of looting. I've seen a riridulous number of looting videos from LA and SF (and other crimes too). No other state produces so much video of criminal activity from random observers.

Where are you getting your more reliable stats? Consider that “the official stats aren’t reliable” does not imply “therefore any stats that support my favorite narrative are more reliable.”

Stores are literally closing because the crime is so bad.

That doesn't sound like data to me.

What are the actual rates of confirmed stores closing? What were they in previous decades? What are other factors -- a pandemic hurting downtown traffic, for example -- that might affect those closures? Can we compare the rates of restaurants closing to the rates of retail stores closing across the years to see if retail stores are closing at a higher rate than restaurants?

And to be clear, I don't see either side of the debate doing that research. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just saying we should follow the data.

Huh. Have you considered these two possibilities:

1) You're not seeing a full feed of all video that gets shot; you're seeing what various media outlets choose to share.

2) Humans being humans, we're more primed to grab video when we're seeing other videos, so you'd expect the distribution not to reflect the ground truth.

I am aware that I won't convince you, but I also need to point out that at least one of the articles I linked to shows stats from adjacent jurisdictions with different laws and charging protocols which don't support the "more crime in SF" thesis.

So it goes.

The public data on shoplifting in San Francisco is so useless that one store accidentally reporting all shoplifting incidents for a brief period tripled the citywide rate: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Targ....

Wow, I'm really surprised I hasn't heard about this before. Part of me wants to believe that the new reporting system accidentally refiled every historical report or something, but if that was the case, you'd think someone involved would have been willing to say that in response to a question.

That doesn't explain the decline in shoplifting reports over the last decade. Presumably if all stores had been doing whatever that Target was doing (and I note that the store in question dropped back down to normal levels the following month), the overall rates would have been three times as high... and dropped at the same rate over the course of a decade.

Trying to interpret trends in garbage data is a fool’s errand, and the store dropped to “normal levels” presumably because it stopped reporting incidents.

I said this elsewhere, but the flaw in the “but the data shows a decrease” type of thinking when it comes to crime is that it doesn’t take into account:

- How low these rates have to go to feel “safe”

- The impact singular novel and particularly violent events has on safety psychology

It’s one thing to have high rates of discrete shoplifting. But even just one daylight smash and grab is enough to rattle people.

The other thing it doesn’t take into account is that the stats are the product of:

1) Crimes that are actually reported to the police

2) The subset of the above that the police accepts a report on and chooses to tell us about

It seems obvious at first glance that those numbers are highly dependent on a bunch if things, and there’s plenty of ways the final number would get divorced from a close coupling with the “actual” real world number.

Or said a different way. Taking that as an argument has as a premise that you trust the police, which seems incompatible with other parts of the same open conversation we’re having about all this.

I think this is absolutely correct on both counts. It is obvious that people don't feel safe or David Sacks (you may recall him from what's currently happening on Twitter) wouldn't have been able to successfully fund the Boudin recall.

But we're engineers. It behooves us to step back and be rational about what the data tells us instead of deciding that data that contradicts our emotions is false.

Agreed. But analysis of data requires context, and good baselines.

And point (1) of my list is based off of not just a general feeling, but comparing it to cities who are touted as being “safe”. And their numbers are incredibly low.

The curious thing is that I've lived in two places now where I see two competing takes: crime is lower than it ever has been, and crime is much more visible to the average person. It always forks into these kinds of discussions where folks roll out stats that don't match people's testimony and there's some mention that all media is conservative and thrives on this kind of news.

I'm not really ready to settle for either of those takes. They both seem wrong. Is there anything else that could create both of these outcomes?

I've lived on the edge of the mission for about a decade (and grew up in Oakland and Albany). Do I think SF is extremely dangerous? Honestly not at all, violent crime is not a major issue here - and it feels safer in most of the city than it did when I was growing up. But I've also seen folks walk into the CVS/Walgreens on mission multiple times and just nonchalantly fill backpacks - and I wouldn't leave a coffee cup in my car. Property crime is extreme here in a way I haven't experienced anywhere else. It doesn't bother me as much as it bothers other people, but I do think it matters - and I think it's very hard to collect clean, comparable data on this stuff given differences in measurement and all the incentives at play. We def have a property crime problem.

There’s a sort of violence that happens when your home or vehicle is broken in to. Or when you witness that store getting ransacked. Or when you hear about a friend that gets robbed at knifepoint.

The sort of violence one doesn't experience, but hears rumors about. The sort of violence one reads about in articles that have a paragraph explaining why all of the statistics are deceptive because they disregard people's perceptions.

Sounds like COVID.

The data on shoplifting is highly unreliable. Most victims don't file official police reports because it's largely a waste of time. The large nationwide chain retailers do have accurate data on loss rates internally but they don't release it.

This is 100% valid, but unless you can explain why there'd be a change in the rate of reports it's hard to explain the consistent decline in shoplifting police reports over the course of the last decade.

I can explain why. Prosecutors increasingly decline to act on shoplifting cases. Thus victims have less incentive to file police reports.

The fact that a number of Walgreens in SF literally closed their doors because of shoplifting in recent years suggests the numbers ain't great.

https://48hills.org/2021/10/no-walgreens-isnt-closing-stores...

That blog post doesn't show that retail thefts were not a reason to close SF Walmart.

The guy found out that in 2017 Walmart decided to close some stores and concluded "aha! closing SF store has nothing to do with rampant and obvious theft but it was part of that program to close stores".

Except the program ended in 2020 and SF store closing was in 2121. It's right there in text supposedly "proving" it's not because theft.

Plus Walgreen explicitly said it's because theft.

There's willful ignorance involved in parsing this information to conclude that it's not theft.

You should re-read what you wrote here and edit it.

Yeah, I get why people have other impressions: media reports. But local media is under severe financial pressure, and negative news about city crime is both eyeball-grabbing and cheap to report. And right-wing national media has had it in for San Francisco for more than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values

That being said, paid media pushes about SF being a hellscape are usually connected to a current political campaign; either to preemptively immunize the city from big spending on some crime initiative with big-pocketed contractors, or to elevate or destroy some candidate for public office.

I assume this is London Breed's office begging for the reactionary vote. Imagine thinking 60 shoplifters are a major danger to the city of San Francisco.

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