I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.
People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.
> quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities
I don't see why speaking out about lack of police enforcement is seen as 'quasi-apocalyptic'.
> despite all available data contradicting that worldview
All available data is in favor of those speaking out about crime & drugs in west coast cities. Additionally, the eye test seems to portray a situation that's more dire than even the data might suggest. (underreporting, catch & release).
Indeed, because that's not what this forum is for. There's ten thousand fora online for general, local, or city-policy political discussion; those topics are only germane in this forum when they relate to tech or the processes of tech.
When the CEO of YCombinator blocks people on Twitter for disagreeing with him online on SF politics[0], it tells me I don't want HN to be a haven for that.
I get that people need to protect their feeds for their mental health, but I'd expect a public figure to have thicker skin and not default to hitting the scorched-earth-mega-auto-block button so often.
I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.
I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"
EDIT: Just to cite my sources: [0] shows 397k registered cars in SF [1] shows 810k residents.
[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-research-reports/research-...
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
> I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.
As a European on this platform it's ceaseless whinging about the state of SF and how the "woke mob" are ruining San Francisco and the state of the Tenderloin versus Mission or Market or whatever and I don't particularly care to know.
Like I've started to learn the parts of a city I have no particular interest in visiting from repeated stories about how someone shouted and pooped in the street because of boogeyman de jour.
Definitely feels like maybe YC could make a "local HN" to save the rest of us from these circular discussions.
Even the very most popular stories get perceived as being suppressed—for a striking example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35296170.
Hmm, the vast majority of tourists in Orlando aren't Orlando residents, but if I got murdered back in my hotel on a Disneyworld trip, I would hope they'd be willing to at least poke into it.
397k for 664k adults means a 59.8% car ownership rate.
The quickest path to karma at HN is to post anything about BA housing.
While we should use data, we should also understand where there may be issues with the data that we're using.
> Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.
Calmly ignoring the threat is evidence that the person was not "in immediate apprehension of such a contact".
I only bring this up because i think it's interesting, and the underlying point you are making is 100% correct. This kind of thing is not normal nor innocent and not to be tolerated.
More details: Fairly normal-looking dude walked up next to me and kept pace for a couple minutes, threatening me and calling me "faggot" (which seemed odd, since I was walking with my girlfriend at the time). I didn't see an actual gun so I figured that the safest course of action was to simply ignore him until he presented more of a threat or walked away. I guess I bored him so he walked away.
The calm took some willpower.
This is actually an interesting point of semantics to me. I guess it'd really hinge on how you define "calmly" here - if you saw me walking my dog while a homeless person screamed that he was going to kill me, I would certainly appear calm. Even internally, I suspect my heart rate would increase but not enormously. Still, I would be very alert and mentally prepared for the possibility that this person is going to attack me, because I very much believe that to be possible. Given that, I would say that I have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harm (and I expect a lot of San Franciscans are similar in that regard).
- Keep an eye on their hands.
- Attempt to de-escalate the person.
- If they brandish a weapon in extreme close proximity to yourself, use both your hands to firmly grab onto the hand/wrist that's holding the weapon and extend your arms fully (using your skeleton to maintain that distance and provide added strength). Your focus should be on controlling that hand so they don't stab or shoot you. Yes, you may incur injury regardless, this is what's colloquially known as a "shit sandwich".
- Increase distance and vacate the area as soon as possible. If they have a gun, run in a zig zag pattern and seek cover (blocks bullets) or concealment (hides you, but doesn't stop bullets).
- Once you are safe, then report the incident to law enforcement (if they'll do anything).
Arms extended gives you the least possible leverage. Like when cops in movies run around with gun drawn at arms' length (the Weaver stance is for target shooting). To disarm a gun-wielding opponent, you want to get in close, grab the weapon from both sides securely (hug it) and do a dead drop. Unless you're fighting The Rock, they can't hold both you and the weapon. Unless you are The Rock, you'll probably get killed grappling with them any other way.
Don't do this for knives. Just stay the length of two arms + 1 beer bottle away from them.
I don't have any advice for swords but anyone who comes at you with one isn't playing by conventional rules, so run like hell.
The zig zag thing is a myth. It works in Counter-Strike, but you'll just end up dying an embarrassing death in reality. The only zig zagging you should be doing is from cover to cover. Get to cover as directly as possible. This isn't The OA...interpretive dance won't save you.
PROTIP: As cover goes, cars are made of the same stuff as beer cans and glass. The IC engine block is the only part that will actually stop a bullet. EVs are explosive.
You don't attempt to de-escalate. You completely ignore. You do not try to grab their wrist. If they brandish a weapon, you run.
You don't report the incident to law enforcement, because they do not care and will do nothing.
Jumping to conclusions and pushing narratives isn't the exclusive purview of any particular group, especially not in 2023.
For those interested in the topic, I recommend Loewen's "Sundown Towns". My copy's on loan, but I think it's in Ch 11, "The Effects of Sundown Towns on Whites" that he talks about the culture among descendants of white-flight suburbanites, their low-to-no-experience views on the horrors of the city, where Those People run rampant. Many are terrified of even going to cities. To people who actually live in the cities, their view is almost unrecognizable.
As an example from something in my feed reader today [1], take Theo Wold, a former Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy (under Trump) and current Idaho Solicitor General. He quote-tweeted a photo of a white woman hugging two Black men. They were the Tennessee Three, the state legislators who were under threat of expulsion for protest.
His comment: "Every Red State will have to wrestle with the fetid, urban Leftist vote sinks. That begins with asking the question: why does the GOP continue to push the annexation/development of rural land that only grows the size and power of Leftist strongholds?"
Fetid stronghold sinks! Sounds pretty bad. In our favor, at least we have taco trucks on every corner.
It reminds me of nothing so much as this bit from Chairman Mao: "It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres and other people in the cities should be persuaded to send their sons and daughters who have completed junior or senior middle school, college or university, to the countryside. Let us mobilize."
[1] https://balloon-juice.com/2023/04/13/late-night-open-thread-...
I would say that the comparison is apt - since we compare the tech/science successes of SF with the rest of the world, we should also compare the crime rates with it.
Brandishing a weapon is legally different from open carry, and is already a crime. Brandishing means to draw or exhibit the weapon in a threatening manner, or to use it in a fight, other than in lawful self-defense.
SF is a dangerous city. That seems to be the main point of concern here.
Guns are clearly more deadly than knives, so I am not intending to equate them, but mass casualty knife attacks also happen.
10 dead, 15 hospitalized in Canada mass stabbing attacks, police say:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-stabbing-saskatchewan-de...
Six people were killed and 14 injured after a knife-wielding man stabbed passersby on a pedestrian shopping street in the eastern Chinese city of Anqing:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/china/china-knife-attacks-mic...
At least 15 killed, dozens injured in knifing near Tokyo
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/nation-world/2016/07...
Do you have a citation on that?
I am not fully researched on this topic, but as a lay observer it appear that the gun rights side basically categorizes anyone who is willing to commit a mass shooting as mentally ill, and hence every mass shooting is a result of mental illness by definition. But it does not follow that mass shooters are mentally ill by any professional standards.
If this is a valid premise, then you know you are doing something wrong as a society. Mass shootings are common place in the US (with currently 177 mass shootings this year so far). This is not normal.
If you use the FBI's active shooting definition, there's closer to 15-20 per year on a 20 year average.
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents...
If you use the GVA definition, which includes a whole lot of other things, then yes. But the GVA's dataset is somewhat suspect.
For example this qualifies as a mass shooting in the GVA:
https://www.atlantapd.org/Home/Components/News/News/4031/631
But not by much. The fact that the murder rate in the US is 7X the murder rate in Europe is a much more relevant statistic.
