The Bob Lee thing was incredibly unfortunate (I used to work with Bob) but violent crime is actually fairly low in SF compared to similar sized cities in the US.

However property crime is not low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use.

Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything.

But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything.

SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago.

The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing.

And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.