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The murder rate in SF is below what it was in the 1990s.

There are far more dangerous cities than SF, which isn’t even in the top 20 in terms of crime. SF does have problems but there’s been a kind of relentless right wing attack on SF and CA in general that simply is not objective and it’s a rea irony because many of the red states have the highest murder rates.

We’ve got a serious problem in this country in many areas but it’s never going to be fixed by getting hysterical over crime.

This was an awful awful awful tragedy, but statistically, all of the people talking about how bad things have gotten apparently didn’t live through the 80s and 90s. We literally had vigilante groups like the Guardian Angels in the 80s because crime was so high. I’d like it if SF takes action to reduce crime of course but I’m skeptics of simplistic claims without knowing the core reasons crime dropped dramatically from 1980-2000.

[people voting it down but providing no rebuttal that the “gotten bad” claims are subjective and don’t map to actual violent crime stats. What has objectively gotten worse is property crime. If someone can provide stats that show violent crime has objectively gotten worse over the last decade or two, I’d be curious]



Why do Americans keep comparing crime rates to 30-50 years ago?

Compare to other societies now.

There’s supposed to be progress, and in other places, there has been.


Comparing a place to other places can help see what's possible, but comparing a place to itself in the past is how you judge progress, no?


Of course they should compare both but how else would you judge progress but to look at the same city over a period of time?


The murder rate might be a misleading characteristic. People might get outside less often on average, that would decrease the murder rates.


"All my shit got ransacked in my apartment, and my car is sitting on cinderblocks now, but hey, look at our low murder rate!"




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