Crime remains a top issue in San Francisco’s current election season. While the reality is that overall crime rates are down, public focus on persistently high property crimes and other signals of disorder continue to stoke public anxiety. The patronizing response from politicians and the media isn’t helping.
Case in point, there have been moments at recent candidate forums where the accepted narrative on crime rates has been questioned. Recently, when progressive challenger Aaron Peskin pointed out comparably high crime rates during frontrunner Mark Farrell’s brief period as interim mayor back in 2018, Farrell shot back, “So, if you believe Supervisor Peskin’s stats, you probably believe Mayor Breed’s stats that crime is down and we should all be feeling safe in our neighborhoods right now.”
At a Sept. 23 supervisorial candidate forum in District 7, comprising usually laid-back neighborhoods like West Portal and Stonestown, audience members shouted down moderator and Mission Local columnist Joe Eskenazi when he sought to correct a statement from a candidate on crime statistics.
‘‘That’s not real,’ someone shouted from the back of the 30-person audience. ‘Stop trying to fact-check,’ another person said. ‘Just ask the question.’” Eskenazi responded, “I can understand that people don’t feel safe, and that is something to address, but do facts not matter anymore,” echoing a tone increasingly attributed to local media not so much as falling on deaf ears but as just plain deaf.
Maybe, just maybe, we should ask why many San Franciscans still don’t feel safe. Has the oversensationalized narrative about San Francisco in national politics also warped local perspectives? Or are residents continuing to see crime on our streets despite all the good news?
Crime statistics, damned as they may be, are vetted at multiple levels of government and academia. The big story these statistics tell is real: crime overall is down. However, it’s also true that the decrease is very uneven across San Francisco’s neighborhoods. Indeed, property crimes in the Sunset have gone up slightly. San Francisco has been a leader in larceny among American cities for years, and even with the decline in overall crime, it still is.
And when somebody does bip your ride or snatch packages off your doorstep, it may not be considered a violent crime, but chances are, you’ll still feel violated.
While San Franciscans have long resisted the temptation to criminalize homelessness, it can no longer be denied that there is a nexus of drug addiction, homelessness, and persistent petty crime that has poisoned downtown’s street life.
And often, the crime at this level goes unreported.
“There are many things that diminish the actual crime numbers from actual crime versus reported crime,” says Jim Dudley, a retired San Francisco deputy police chief and lecturer at San Francisco State University. “There are so many variables at play in why people don’t report crime; maybe they thought what happened to them was minimal. They don’t want to take the time; they don’t want to go to court; they don’t want to testify; they fear retaliation. Many of these are lower-level crimes; almost all officer-observed street infractions or street misdemeanors, and with 600 officers less than we should have, you have much less reporting.”
It’s this nexus of crime and blight that San Francisco has long tolerated as policymakers look for solutions to its component problems that don’t repeat mistakes of the past. However, due to new crises and decades of complacency at City Hall, its “containment zone” has seeped beyond its traditional borders, even with our politicians now playing catch-up. Businesses like Ikea face withering pressure to survive; others like Bayside Market succumb, as business owners and workers alike recoil at real and perceived risks.
The past two years have seen progress with voters approving new solutions to these problems, but hidebound quarters of the city’s establishment continue to push back. The longer they do so, public confidence in the city’s recovery will continue to decline. How many steps are taken forward versus how many steps back, both at the polls and at City Hall, will determine whether we reach the offramp from the doom loop.