People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.
Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.
On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.
Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from strangers [1]
[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.
What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.
Obviously others will have different experiences than me.
Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.
Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.
Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.
And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.
The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.
In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.
That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr
It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.
From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.
I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.
I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.
Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right decision by staying away from the US despite the significant wage disparity.
