As a former SF resident now living in Manhattan I can definitely say I generally feel much safer in NYC than I did in SF. I’m guessing it’s a combination of the fact that most of Manhattan is so gentrified that there are few pockets of poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive and the number/visibility of police is comparably much higher. Taxes and CoL are comparable, so I definitely feel like I’m getting more for my $$ as far as security and safety goes.
I loathe San Francisco it's a gross city especially Market St. and many of its surrounding areas. There's no other city in the US where Ive witnessed so many people on the streets; very sad and everywhere you go the sights & smells hits you. Makes you appreciate what you have, yet sad such a place exists (what can you do to help all these people) and I've lived in Philly, NYC, Baltimore and Nashville.
This is a product of SF being extremely welcoming and supportive of the homeless and the poor.
It's interesting to me how so many people confuse the absence of poverty/crime/homelessness with a system that has solved it. NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse. This is the opposite of what most people consider to be a real solution, yet NYC is praised for it. It is praised for the ends, not the means.
SF actually employs more of the policies people claim that they want to see, and as a result, it welcomes more homeless, and as a result, has more homeless, and as a result, it is demonized.
New York State law also mandates that cities must provide shelter beds for their homeless population, so there is enough shelter space for their homeless population, there is no such law in SF/CA.
A significant proportion of the rough sleeper population are not easily housed. They may have significant mental health issues that do not warrant involuntary hospitalisation, but cause them to be extremely disruptive or unwilling to be housed. They may have unmanaged substance abuse problems, particularly alcohol dependency. Trauma and PTSD often play a significant role. Sometimes, they're just antisocial assholes. Most of these people can eventually be housed, but it often takes years of intensive support and dozens of false starts.
Homelessness exists in a complex relationship with many other personal and social problems. The provision of shelters is only one element of the solution. If you aim for a complete and rapid elimination of visible rough sleeping, you'll inevitably end up persecuting rough sleepers or bussing them off to somewhere else. There is a great deal that can be done to reduce rough sleeping and much of it isn't being done, but there's no magic wand.
> They may have significant mental health issues that do not warrant involuntary hospitalisation, but cause them to be extremely disruptive or unwilling to be housed. They may have unmanaged substance abuse problems, particularly alcohol dependency.
When you make housing for the homeless dependent on being sober and clean, just what, exactly, do you expect as an outcome if not that?
THIS moralizing "Oh, but you've got to DESERVE the help!" is partly why homelessness (and poverty) are still major problems in the US.
(Oh, and the truly pathetic NIMBYism in San Fran doesn't help anything... It makes solving the housing problem in general intractible. Seriously, shut up about the "character of the city" when you're really just using that as an excuse to increase your home value and when that "character" leads to a whole bunch of homelessness and rent that is impossible for people seeking jobs to afford.)
>When you make housing for the homeless dependent on being sober and clean, just what, exactly, do you expect as an outcome if not that?
Note my use of the word "unmanaged". It's possible to house people with active substance abuse problems, but it's considerably more challenging, particularly heavy drinkers and crack users. There is a significant impact in terms of care because you're dealing with people who have a limited capacity to look after themselves, but the primary impediment is aggression and violence. It only takes one difficult resident to turn the whole facility into bedlam, at which point you're faced with few options other than evicting them for the sake of the other residents.
Wet houses do exist, but they're a lot more expensive to run and they face far more local opposition. They're a fundamentally good idea, but housing alcoholics and other difficult-to-house groups is a lot more complex than just "open more shelters". You need a highly skilled multidisciplinary team to make it work, and you're still going to have some amount of unavoidable rough sleeping.
If you still don't see where I'm coming from, imagine a crack addict with diagnosed antisocial personality disorder. Imagine someone who has been arrested multiple times for assaulting medical staff and police officers. Imagine someone whose life revolves around multi-day crack binges, which usually end in an episode of drug-induced psychosis and either an ER visit or an arrest. These people are not exceptional in the population of chronic rough sleepers, but they're exceptionally difficult to house.
Sounds like they're exceptionally difficult when you don't house them as they end up in contact with police or medical staff.
Sometimes the best answer is to just give them their own space instead of a shared facility.
I've had plenty of contact with the homeless, have housed them in my own home for a night or three. They all have at least some kind of substance abuse problem (every one smoked, for instance). But if you push them out on the street, they'll end up eventually in the ER or in contact with police. This is way more expensive.
Highly dysfunctional people generally become less dysfunctional when they're housed, but they also become your problem. In an ideal world society would see the benefits, but in the real world, you're going to have to deal with an onslaught of problems. The neighbours are going to kick up an enormous fuss if the guy down the hall is stumbling around drunk at all hours of the day and night. The police are going to be all over you if your property turns into a crack den. You've got liability issues if one of your residents burns the place down.
Housing is a crucial part of the response to homelessness, but it's only a part. Some people can walk straight into a home and get back on their feet, but some people will need intensive support and others just aren't ready to be housed.
I'd start with local agencies that provide support for people experiencing homelessness and addiction. I'd also look to work with anyone who might be seen as a "community leader". If you're looking to open a wet house then you'll need great staff, but you'll also need good working relationships with other agencies. If you can't get the local government on your side, then you're doomed from the outset. You need people who are connected and know how to work the system.
I've worked in housing advice and have been personally involved in rehousing homeless people. A member of my immediate family is a director of a housing association and has run several supported housing facilities.
It'd be fantastic if homelessness was as simple as "give people homes", but it isn't. Housing is part of the problem - a very large part in some areas - but chronic rough sleepers have very complex needs.
If you don't believe me, go out and talk to some rough sleepers. Ask them about their life stories. Ask them about the people they've met on the streets. You'll find some people who have had a bad run of luck and just need somewhere to stay, but you'll also find people who are highly dysfunctional and need intensive support to rebuild their lives.
Finland have substantially reduced homelessness, but they're some way from eliminating it. The most effective element of their programme appears to be homelessness prevention, through early intervention for families and individuals at risk of homelessness.
The obvious difference is simply money. Finland spends 50% more on welfare than the US as a proportion of GDP. They have publicly-funded healthcare of exceptionally high quality, extensive social support and a comprehensive public housing programme.
This all connects together. Fewer people fall into homelessness as a result of poverty, because they have a comprehensive welfare state. Fewer people become homeless because of mental illness or drug addiction, because there's comprehensive healthcare coverage and easy access to rehab. Fewer people become homeless when leaving prison, because ex-offenders are referred directly to social workers who can provide personal support, drug treatment and housing. The housing-first model is one element of a holistic strategy to reduce poverty and destitution.
The US could achieve something similar, but it'd cost somewhere in the region of $500bn a year, even accounting for efficiency savings. It also takes a long time. Finland's homelessness initiative more than halved homelessness, but it took the best part of 20 years to achieve. Sadly, I'm not sure that America has the political will to spend a lot of money over a long period of time.
I've yet to meet a person in SF who wants these policies towards the homeless.
Compassion is reducing the friction to life, somehow creating $500/month apartments with no credit checks and month to month.
Compassion isn't letting the homeless do anything, camp and violate other's rights, disrupt and distress the working lower to middle class, and reducing the penalties for petty crime while increasing the fines for minor infractions by taxpayers.
New York City has homeless shelter capacity for 60,000 or more people every night. It puts San Francisco to shame in that regard. The reason tens of thousands of homeless people aren't all in the street, is because they have such vast shelter capacity.
San Francisco can't manage to handle 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent shelter (~6,600 total homeless), despite its immense affluence as a city. It's a failure of priorities.
I think you need to account for the fact that SF has a population of ~860,000 where as NY has a population of ~8,500,000. You also have to account for the weather in SF vs NY. Not defending either city just trying to put the numbers in to perspective
I was accounting for that. NYC manages to provide shelter space for 10x the number of homeless persons as there are total in SF, while having 10x the population of SF.
I'd argue that it's easier for a smaller affluent city of 860k to solve a problem of roughly 3,000 +/- homeless people (their problem isn't the 6k overall figure, it's a smaller subset of that), than it is to deal with 10x that homeless figure at 10x the city size. Human problems like that get more difficult with scale rather than easier.
I'm not sure how SF weather plays in to providing shelter space for the homeless as a problem. It should be easier and cheaper for SF to do it, as SF requires both less air conditioning in the warm months and less heating in the cold months. Of course, this is also where SF's terrible zoning laws show up as usual.
The weather effect isn't about the cost of the shelter space. There is less incentive to put up with shelter rules (or risks, as the case may be) when the homeless can sleep outdoors somewhat comfortably year-round.
Anecdotally I can tell you shelters begin to fill up when it snows or gets extremely cold. This weekend NYC is looking at lows in the teens. SF, lows in the mid 40s.
What beaner is saying is: If City A orders cops to hassle rough sleepers and panhandlers, closes homeless shelters and offers the homeless bus tickets to other cities; while City B doesn't do those things; then City B will have more homeless people on the streets despite the fact their policies are kinder, more charitable and more humane towards the homeless.
I live in NYC, and we're currently in the middle of a two-week-long span of high winds and average temperatures of -9°C, with lows of -15°C (before you add in wind chill).
If you don't have good shelter for these conditions death is pretty much a guarantee. I sure as hell would never want to be homeless in NYC during a winter like this one. You cannot discount the effect of weather on homeless populations, and even the homeless can typically scrounge together enough money for a one-way bus ticket to somewhere warmer, once.
That in combination with unaffordable housing. There are plenty of homeless people in these places who aren't mentally ill and do in fact still have full-time jobs; they just literally can't afford a place to live and end up living in their car in a parking lot somewhere. If everything else about their situation remained the same, except rent prices were cheaper, they wouldn't be homeless.
I agree, weather plays a huge role. To praise NYC for lack of homelessness when very few homeless could live there as a result of that factor, doesn't make much sense.
>This is a product of SF being extremely welcoming and supportive of the homeless and the poor.
>NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse.
This is part of the puzzle. However, I think there are other contributing factors too, like the weather. If I was homeless I sure wouldn't want to be in NY in winter.
Also NYC does have an enormous homelessness problem. It's just that it also has a culture of police action driving homeless people out of upscale areas so that the well off don't have to be distressed by noticing it.
San Francisco is a perfect illustration of a liberal ethos : "Let me step over a homeless person on my way to a party where I can pontificate with my compassionate friends about the homelessness over a glass of Aubert"
Seconded. On my visits to Berlin, my travel companions were often absolutely terrified because of the huge amounts of graffiti, the gutter punks at train stations and the open prostitution around Oranienburger Straße. They thought that they had arrived in some sort of dystopian nightmare. After a few days, they realised that Berlin is incredibly safe and welcoming, it just doesn't have any pretensions. Berlin has the same social problems as any other big city, but they're managed in open view rather than swept under the carpet.
NYC aggressively arrests anyone breaking the rules so homeless don't stay there.
Now I'm in a city with a lot of visible homeless and the government tolerating it is the real problem. They allow homeless to build massive camps filled with drugs, garbage, and human waste.
And they don't hang out in these gross camps for company. It's mostly for easy access to drugs. The city should tear these camps down the day they form.
Homeless population is one of the toughest issues a city can have. Homeless people aren't stupid, and the more welcoming you make your city the more homeless you will end up with. Considering the size of the US, there's a practically unlimited number of homeless that can come to your city if it's welcoming enough, and that's exactly what has happened to SF. There's plenty of other places with decent weather, but the homeless problem in CA is mostly a product of the politics there.
We pour endless billions toward 'solving' homelessness when it's been a problem since ancient times. Some people are just too crazy or addicted to live a normal life. The answer is to bring back asylums to hold these people against their will, but that's too politically radioactive to do.
I have a family member of the crazy variety and I would love if they were in an asylum. I wouldn't have to worry about them dying on the streets. This family member is so crazy that if you gave them a house they would likely burn it down or otherwise ruin it anyways. Far too crazy to live with the family, basically a danger to themselves and society. I would guess the majority of homeless are the same.
All these initiatives to provide housing and training are misguided, a normal person will rarely be homeless for more than a few months. The majority of the homeless population is chronic, and these people would already have shelter if they were sane or sober enough to maintain one.
All this talk about personal safety... there were so many homeless people in SF that clearly had an untreated psychiatric condition. How safe do you think it is for them? Everyone goes on about shit on the streets like it's a normal 'poor person' thing to do. It isn't.
What are we supposed to do? People seem to be against institutionalization because it denies them their freedom and they refuse to use the many public and private homeless assistance programs available to them.
It's not like this is a unique local issue, but SF seems to handle it worse than almost any other city in the developed world. All you need is the political will and to copy how other places do it.
The high cost of housing no doubt plays a large role in the Bay Area's homelessness situation.
That in turn has a demand side cause -- the continued influx of highly paid tech workers -- and a supply side cause -- the economically illiterate politics which paints housing development as some sort of handout to developers. The supply side of this problem could be fixed through political means, at no real cost to anyone. New York has 6x the population density of San Francisco yet lower housing prices, because it has the capacity to meet the demand.
It is, but I understand that not very many people live on Wall Street.
(Yes, recently the population of Manhattan has gone up, although it hasn't fully recovered from the downs of 1980's and is still much lower than 100 years ago).
"Manhattan is so gentrified that there are few pockets of poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive"
This is basically slowly happening in SF as well. As much as SF-natives didn't want the "Manhattanization" of SF, it is happening just with a lot fewer people able to afford it.
That's because SF is unarguably a complete shithole (like literally, as in there is human feces on every street). There is a reason I refuse unequivocally to ever take a job that requires me to live in the Bay Area. Remote work isn't just good for your startup's office rent, it's good for worker health, diversity of experience and regional cultures, and helps your workers live in places that don't suck. Bringing everyone to SF is unnecessarily expensive and that city is awful.
If you are poor and you can't afford housing NYC has some brutal weather. With the increasing prices its hard to get housing there. I don't really know how you can survive on the streets there. At least SF has more temperate climate.
All* the violent crime in New York City (especially gang related) happens in the NYCHA ghettos, it has been this way for a long time and even that is lower now.
Dnainfo had a map of nyc gangs and it was funny because they all looked like xbox live usernames, and then the awkward reality set in that the gangs are all 14* year olds
I walk around all parts of the city considered “dangerous” (Bayview, Mission, Ocean View/Ingleside) and nothing has happened to me. Really the only “bad” area SF has is the Tenderloin and it’s common sense not to be out there wandering around even during the day.
You can't use a personal anecdote to suggest SF is at least as safe as NYC or other major urban centers. "Anecdotally" I saw way more broken glass on sidewalks from car break-ins, saw several phone jackings in broad daylight, and, at the same day, remember wondering to myself on many days why I hadn't seen a single police officer/car on my regular commute...
I'm frankly surprised the situation in SF has not garnered more attention. At Ed Lee's funeral, it was endless adulation. You wouldn't know what the city had become. We've gone well beyond trash-chic...SF has become downright dangerous and teetering on something far worse.
I don't go to SF unless I have to now. I have no idea why rich people are still flocking to SF. It is only a matter of time before the homeless set up at Broadway and Broderick.
Last time I was there I saw a nice woman driving in a top-line Range Rover with her cute blonde kids in the back. They stopped at an intersection near the Bay Bridge. The underpass was jammed with tents and all manner of desperate people. Some young guy from the camp made eye contact with them and stared them down from a distance...they were oblivious. These people think the invisible wall will hold. I don't want to be in SF the day it breaks down, and I am convinced it will.
The city government isn't liberal enough to raise a local tax to build a solution, but also not conservative enough to take a hard line. They're just letting it fester and it will become worse and worse until someone decides to break through the invisible line separating the tent cities from the Pac Heights mansions.
I'm not looking to accuse anyone of racism here. It just felt as though there were some underlying values being expressed in the comment that were not being stated explicitly.
I find it extremely difficult to have meaningful conversations when we obscure our values and are not transparent about our ethical reasoning. The commenter said the driver was nice but clearly didn't interact with her. "Nice" is a signifier of value and I was hoping to tease out a conversation about that.
San Francisco is far from Detroit or East St. Louis or even other places in California.
Though I may have a different perspective on “crime” since I’m not as easily scared and use my senses to keep me out of trouble. It’s a city, shit happens just make sure it doesn’t happen to you.
Yeah... no. Not all cities are equal - as the crime stats you just ignored show.
I just moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn - it's not the same as Manhattan, but I still feel safer in Brooklyn than in SF.
And you say "avoiding the tenderloin even during the day is common sense" - it's not the Bronx, it's in the middle of town. Make a left from a $400/night hotel room and you're standing next to human feces and needles.
That would be like if I told NYC visitors to "avoid midtown west in Manhattan, it's just common sense."
But you know what is interesting - you would've gotten that advice in NYC in 1985. Times Square wasn't safe. Now it's a shithole of a different variety - but a safe one.
I think there’s a transgressive element to pooping on the sidewalk specifically, as opposed to areas that are still accessible but not directly in people’s walking paths.
That said, I certainly don’t blame them for being transgressive.
We had friends recently stay at the Hilton near "Union Square". It didn't describe that it was basically in Tenderloin and the area was pretty shitty, and even worse at night. Had we known we would have warned them, because it's very deceiving.
The Hilton is legitimately in the Union Square area. The problem is that if you take the most obvious route to Market St. and the Moscone, that takes you right through the Tenderloin if you don't know to avoid it. (That said, I try to avoid the Hilton on O'Farrell if I can.)
You see what you want to see. If you think it’s such a crime ridden place horrible, when really every place in the first world deals with the same issues, then fine. I choose to see it for what it is, it’s not anarchy here, things are just fine
> it’s common sense not to be out there wandering around even during the day
It seems pretty bad that a major western city has a completely no-go area right in the middle. Dismissing it as not a problem because it’s common sense to avoid a large area of the centre of the city doesn’t help the argument!
The Tenderloin is a shithole. Don't go there. And don't park your car on the street down there unless you like replacing window glass. Loads of shady looking people standing around, selling and buying crack, screaming at the top of their lungs at ghosts as they zigzag down the street dodging cars, and homeless people shitting and pissing on the sidewalks. Also lots of petty theft and assault, and the SFPD doesn't do much about it.
It's not at all a no-go area. The Tenderloin is one of the most expensive and desirable neighborhoods in SF. It's no worse than the Mission or 6th and Market. It's definitely the best place I lived in all of SF, including the Mission, SOMA, and the Sunset. No wonder people are paying $3-4k a month for studios there. Yes, there are drug spots and such but it's definitely not a place to fear or avoid. That's nonsense.
This is the first time I've heard about The Tenderloin being a desirable neighborhood. Are you sure you were actually living in the Tenderloin and not one of its adjacent neighborhoods?
I've never felt unsafe walking around in the Tenderloin, e.g. carrying an infant. The main 'problem' people have is that there are poor people living there in SROs, and a good number of homeless people loitering all the time. But they mostly keep to themselves. Some folks certainly have substance abuse or mental health problems and will be talking to themselves, and if you walk through you might get shouted at, and sometimes there is a shouting match out in public, and statistically there is some amount of crime between residents, but it's generally not a physical threat to people walking through. It is by no means a 'no-go area'.
> I've never felt unsafe walking around in the Tenderloin, e.g. carrying an infant.
Are you joking? Or just insane?
I'm a 160 lbs male and would not walk through the tenderloin at night. It's really fucking scary. Almost everyone there is homeless and on drugs. The bad kind of drugs.
I would go so far as to say that someone carrying an infant through that area might be endangering the child.
Kid or no kid, the Tenderloin is fine as long as you "fit in"... but if it looks like you can be scared out of some cash, you will get the predatory stare.
My wife got attacked in San Francisco in Tenderloin around 11am, a few blocks away from Clift Hotel on the second day of the trip. I guess her carrying a Starbucks cup made her a target.
The fact that SF tolerates shit like this under the banner of "acceptance", "it is mental health" or whatever the hell it may be is mind blowing.
People living in a snooty wealthy bubble get 'really fucking scared' pretty easily. It's not like drug addicts sitting on the sidewalk go out of their way to attack strangers walking by in the middle of a busy public street. I'm not recommending you find a big angry looking person and insult his mother.
There are lots of people with kids who live in the Tenderloin and presumably pass through their own neighborhood at all hours.
Walking around near poor homeless people now counts as 'child endangerment' I guess...
Not to be mean but 160 lbs isn't heavy at all. If you're pushing 200 lbs and go to the gym regularly you'll have a lot less people bothering you on the street. I still wouldn't recommend walking through the Tenderloin alone though.
Do people in Bolivia shit on the side of the street or in other public areas? Because that's what they do in SF. So many homeless people shit on the BART escalator that it once took a station's escalations out of service.
Last time I spent a week in SF for WWDC, I saw one car breakin (near Height-Ashbury) and one woman get her phone snatched and shoved to the ground so violently she hit her head on the pavement and started bleeding (Market street).
I've never witnessed a single act of crime like that in any other city I've been to on earth (I lived in Europe, now in Asia), so it was quite shocking.
Thanks for your anecdote. I have had friends beaten up and robbed in the Mission. I have a friend who lives in Bayview who had his windows shot out. My friend's friend was mugged in Glen Park BART station, she was punched in the face and the mugger grabbed her bag, no one did anything. My wife's friends had their phones stolen off their table at a Starbucks in Noe.
Sure, and the same anecdotes hold in Manhattan. I've had friends robbed at knifepoint in the Upper West Side, I've seen phone jackings at 1pm in front of Gristedes in the Upper East Side. Hell, my brother's roommate in Harlem was clocked with a baseball bat in the head while leaving his apartment and subsequently robbed blind.
By and large NYC and San Francisco are both very safe cites in the grand scheme of things. (Unless you are a car window in San Francisco. Then you are screwed).
I never said San Francisco was safer than NYC, but even looking at those statistics they are mostly comparable in terms of violent crimes (notice that I did say your car is much more likely to get burgled in San Francisco), and the rate of aggravated assault is higher in that study in NYC. My point is that that both San Francisco and NYC are by and large safe cities by American city standards.
I once had dinner at Montesacro Pinseria at night and parked a couple of blocks away....the walk to the alley where the restaurant is was interesting. I didn't feel unsafe simply because so many people were outside and there was lots of traffic but I still was pretty surprised that SF had areas like that. I joked with my wife , who was terrified, that it reminded me of CJs first neighborhood in GTAV.
> poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive
I know the parent comment only said this in passing, but let's be careful about assuming poor communities are gang-infested or dangerous. AFAIK, gangs are not a problem in most American cities.
Not trying to overgeneralize but there’s definitely a correlation between poverty and gang activity. I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC.
In Manhattan, I think the last pockets of seediness were in Alphabet City but that has quickly gentrified as well. As far as I know gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
There was a major gang bust at the houses on Amsterdam Ave in Harlem a couple years ago. Plenty of bad shit still happens uptown. But it definitely is concentrated in pockets now, and it's definitely less bad than it was even a few years ago.
MS-13 is around in some isolated pockets on Long Island. About 1100 identified members total in Nassau and Suffolk, though not all are active. Generally stick to El Salvadoran neighborhoods in certain large-ish communities.
> there’s definitely a correlation between poverty and gang activity
Broadly, I agree. To refine my point: Most street gangs are in poor areas but most poor areas don't have street gangs.
> gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
Does anyone know any hard data on MS-13 activity? Government has made it a talking point recently but I haven't seen data on how common it really is.
> I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC.
That seems true to me and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
I guess my general point, which was not a criticism of yours (yours just made me think about it), was: Let's be careful about broad stereotypes which can and do result in criminalizing poor people. I will add an observation by the esteemed Woodrow Wilson Guthrie: "Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen." I would guess that the latter cause far more harm each year than the former, and in NYC especially.
Per the FBI there are 10,000 MS-13 members out of an estimated 1.4 million US gang members total. MS-13 is in every major city in the US, the scale obviously varies. They get so much attention due to the extreme violence they tend to utilize, rather than the sheer number of members.
> MS-13 is in every major city in the US, the scale obviously varies.
Is that also from the data?
> They get so much attention due to the extreme violence they tend to utilize, rather than the sheer number of members.
This is the kind of thing I try to avoid: Do we know that the violence is more extreme than other gangs? And I suspect they get attention because it fits the White House's / GOP's immigration narrative. But who can say why something gets attention?
I'm from Iowa. Pretty much every city with at least 50k people has gang activity. There are parts of Podunk, Iowa that you simply do not drive through, unless you're buying crack.
> and crime will have declined for 27 straight years
> But criminologists differ about the cause of the continued declines. Mr. Zimring said that while better policing accounted for much of the decline in crime since 1990, it was no longer a primary driver. New York is “tiptoeing” toward a 90 percent crime decline for reasons that remain “utterly mysterious,” he said.
The "27 straight years" caught my eye, and reminded me of something I saw a good decade ago, so may I suggest something controversial?
It doesn't perfectly match 27 years ago, but this is across the whole US, not just NYC - (popular) violent video games are highly correlated with the drop in crime: http://oi25.tinypic.com/2r6ns4y.jpg
(Correlation <> causation, but I _definitely_ think it merits more investigation... does anyone else happen to know more?)
* First instinct is that the fall-off should be more gradual if it's based on people's ages, not have that sudden sharp descent. I don't put a lot of weight to this though since the 20-year gap makes it sound like the exposure has to be under a certain age (and so within a relatively small range), which would appear as a relatively sharp drop.
* Second, after noticing the graph doesn't actually look like the one I posted (which jtmarmon posted confirmation to in a google doc), I took a closer look: It claims to be using "violent crimes per 100,000 population", but instead matches this chart from wikipedia [0], which isn't scaled by population - it's using raw numbers from the UCR data tool [1]. If the gasoline line is labeled wrong as well, then there's probably no issue, but if it's labeled correctly then half the correlation for this story isn't actually a correlation. Not sure where to look for that one, though.
People know that there is a drop a drop in crime on the weekend that a big violent movie comes out.
It's also known that male participation has dropped in the labour force and in particular young males without many skills who also tend to commit crime:
Personally I think there is something in this. A big, time consuming engaging hobby appearing that young males take to with great enthusiasm appearing as games got cheaper and better.
> in particular young males without many skills who also tend to commit crime
> A big, time consuming engaging hobby appearing that young males take to with great enthusiasm appearing as games got cheaper and better.
I wasn't even thinking along those lines, my thought was more about the "violent" part of "violent video games" - that the games acted as a sort of stress release valve, helping people with their self-control when it matters.
It could do that. Or it might just give them a reason to do something else rather than hang out with other bored young men and potentially plan things.
It's also worth noting that the drop in crime has also happened in a bunch of countries around the same time.
Another thing that has happened at the same time is the rise of Hikikomori and others who stay at home with their parents and don't do a lot.
Now of course, there are phones in the hand of so many young people giving them a constant feed of engaging content. This no doubt hinders people's concentration but it also might, again, stop people comitting crimes.
I think the concept you're looking for is the one of catharsis [1].
Aristoteles used it to explain why theater was a good thing, when people were complaining that violence in dramas may cause violence in society. The global idea is that it purges it instead (people experience violence during a play, so they are less inclined to want to experience it in reality).
Interesting perspective. Yeah, video games, netflix, cheap food, weed and welfare definitely seem to keep many poor people in couch lock stupors. And maybe violent video games add some kind of aggression sink effect. Wow.
So the issue I have with people citing gentrification is: given gentrification alone (without an accompanied descrease in overall wealth inequality) wouldn’t the concentrated wealth attract crime? So any argument that cites gentrification has to show that it brings up everybody, not just the gentrifiers.
"It’s working, for now, in New York. Detroit had a little less luck with it, because there are not very many 26-year-olds earning $600,000 a year who want to live in Detroit."
It's hard to create a welfare system akin to NYC when young professionals do not want to move there.
The welfare situation down there doesn’t really seem sufficient.
The NYCHA, on the other hand, appears to be functional and provides relative security and stability for its residents, while the city provides enough work opportunity for those who can and want to work. You couldn’t write an article like this about Chicago: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448741/new-york-city-m...
Convincing the citizens of Chicago/Illinois more taxes is a good solution would not be easy. The state of Illinois itself is bankrupt and already suffers from exorbitant taxes.
I also really want someone to study the rise in popularity of "gangsta rap" and the decrease in crime.
While listening to the great podcast "Mogul", it struck me how many people were pushed away from gangs due to the success of friends/family in the hip-hop industry.
I can also speak from experience that not all NYPD are eager to take in a report of violent crime, but the OP isn't just talking about felonies, but homicides. "The Wire" Season 4 aside, it's much harder for the police to fudge a body count.
An increase in reported sexual assaults isn't necessarily a signal of crime trends as it may reflect an increase in willingness of victims to report versus past years.
Speaking of Baltimore and its homicide rate, the Sun had a great investigation in 2010 that busted the department for having a sharp drop in reported rapes while having a steady/increasing homicide rate -- a great example of the use of (relatively simple) statistics -- such as how Baltimore was one of the few major cities to have more homicides than rapes -- that effected change:
> A major category of crime is up substantially in Baltimore, and police and city officials are pleased.
> A year after The Baltimore Sun revealed that the city led the country in the number of rape reports discarded by detectives — part of what women's advocates and victims said was a broader pattern of ignoring sexual assaults — the number of rapes being reported is up more than 50 percent.
> but the OP isn't just talking about felonies, but homicides. "The Wire" Season 4 aside, it's much harder for the police to fudge a body count.
Yes, but you also need to take into account that emergency rooms have gotten much better at treating gunshot wounds and other serious crime-related traumas. I.e. even with the same exact level of crime, the homicide rate would still have gone down significantly over the last few decades.
I think that's a legitimate argument. However, it seems unlikely that law enforcement agencies fudged the rest of their violent crime numbers to show a corresponding sharp decline in non-homicide rates. (Though given enough pressure to have good stats, anythings possible!)
But New York's low crime rate is remarkable not only when compared across decades. The 2017 reported numbers are notable because it's yet another year of improvement in the post-Bloomberg-tough-policing era. At its peak, Bloomberg's policies resulted in 685,724 stop-and-frisk reports in 2011. After a lawsuit in 2012 -- stop-and-frisks declined to 45,787 by 2014, Bill de Blasio's first year. In 2016, the number was 12,404:
This radical departure in policy was blamed for a jump in homicides and shootings in 2015 [0], even as the NYPD reported a massive drop in complaints [1]. In 2017, both complaints and violent crime are at lows. If only felonies and violent non-homicides had decreased, you could make an argument that the dropped rates are from police cooking the stats. But healthcare tech hasn't improved that much from 2014 to make a huge dent in killed persons.
Yeah here in Los Angeles your tenant can put your building manager in the hospital on a meth induced violence binge and even destroy the property but they won't make an arrest even when there's a victim in the hospital. So for example this crime that really happened was not allowed to be reported.
> cops aren't always eager to take reports (I speak from experience)
Cops have no say in whether to take or not take a report. Call 311, make a police report, meet the officer dispatched to you and sign. I agree that getting the NYPD to actually act on a police report is puzzlingly difficult.
I've heard of NYC cops doing tricks like reporting a bag stolen off the subway as "lost property" if the victim didn't actually see someone take it.
There was also an infamous case where a pattern of attempted rapes got reported as lesser crimes like trespassing, so a serial offend who should have gotten a serious investigation never got one, and went uncaught for a long time.
The other day I tried to report someone who was blatantly trying to sell me a stolen computer. I was disappointed to find that they don't maintain any kind of database of serial numbers of lost and stolen electronics.
The implication is that, if you do lose something or have it stolen, there is no way for the police to help you get it back.
> I was disappointed to find that they don't maintain any kind of database of serial numbers of lost and stolen electronics.
NYC actually does, but you have to register your number before it gets stolen.
Usually this is fine, because most people don't know their serial number after the device is stolen, unless they've thought to register it beforehand anyway.
I don't agree, as I've walked into a police station and literally gone through a long waiting and questioning process with strong reminders that it probably wouldn't be acted on. The questions all preceded with 'But are you sure that..'. After adamantly Yes replying and playing politics, I got my report. That's what I mean by reluctance. This happened on two occasions and echoes what friends have experienced in different police stations.
rapes were down from last year by one, to 1,417, misdemeanor sex crimes — a catchall for various types of misconduct that includes groping — ticked up 9.3 percent to 3,585 so far
In addition, note that this is the year of the #metoo movement
Of course not. You can't cover those up, or downplay them.
Downplaying crimes means less serious crimes on the books, which makes the department commander look better, and improves re-election chances for mayors.
In NYC, due to the 1990's and the vivid memories some of us have of what safety was like then, crime is an extremely make-or-break factor in electoral races.
Unfortunately, these memories are fading and people's understanding of crime reporting statistics aren't improving, either.
Yes, it's official that NYC reclassified many crimes in the last 24 months. Whether or not this was good is subject to debate; but undoubtedly it leads to a 'lower crime rate.'
That's the legal, official piece of the puzzle. The unoffocial one comes to play when you try to convince the cops not to downplay a crime you report. No one carries statistics on officers downgrading crimes when they file reports.
This became really obvious when sex crime victims started getting press attention and reporting anecdote after anecdote of victim-blaming, indifference and worse.
I visited NYC a year ago for the first time. It amazed me the amount of police present everywhere. The sheer number of police out and about was shocking.
Manhattan is saturated with police as well as integrated with a web of linked surveillance cameras. Brooklyn has fewer but still far, far more then other parts of the country, especially out west. New York City has roughly 50,000 police officers and a police budget of over $4 billion dollars just for the city alone. On top of that you have state troopers and a variety of other agencies (like the MTA, the many federal police agencies in the city and the heavily armed army/national guard troops that are often visible in uniform/armor at Penn Station and other places around the city) who have their own police officers. Within 30 miles of the city you have thousands and thousands more police officers from Nassau, Westchester, Suffolk, and other surrounding counties (as well as additional police forces from towns within these counties). You're talking about 70,000+ officers within a 50 mile radius.
By comparison, Arizona has a total of about 14,000 police - for the whole state. Colorodo has about 12,000. Most states are comparable to this. You are just far, far less likely to see police officers in most other places in the country. As a New Yorker, I'm always astonished by the lack of police presence in other states (let alone other countries) because policing is so ubiquitous here.
I went to a Yankees game, saw Blackbird with Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams (forget the theater), Smalls Jazz Club in the West Village, Nom Wah Tea Palor in the Chinese district, Diwanekhaas in the financial district, walked the Brooklyn Bridge then around Brooklyn. I mention the different locations and where I went because I walked everywhere to and from then around if something caught my eye. The only time I didn't walk is when I took the subway from Smalls Jazz club was back to the apartment I was staying at which was near W 48th and 8th.
As I stated that was my first time visiting, so I am not really sure how that covers NYC from a local perspective - I was certainly tired after 5 days. However, I did see police everywhere I went, except at 2am when I was walking from the subway back to the apartment.
Every place you mentioned I would expect significant police presence either because of the venue or locale. Since the Germans 'artists' swapped out the flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge there has been a permanent and rather disrupting police present on the bridge itself.
You realize those areas are 'New Brooklyn', recently came into money. Its not a coincidence that they are close to Manhattan and get increased police force for the rich yuppies.
Source: born in and lived in brooklyn for over 20 yrs.
St. Louisan here. What's really impressive about our murders is that basically ~95% of them take place within two small neighborhoods inside St. Louis city limits, which itself is but one small subsection of the metro area, which actually has a population hovering around 3 million. Those two neighborhoods, Dutchtown and North City, are impressively dangerous, so dangerous that even diluting them with the rest of the city still places us at the top of "most dangerous cities" lists year after year.
That doesn't explain the similar drops in crime in Canada, most of Europe, Australia, and a ton of other countries. The US is nearly unrivaled in incarceration, but crime hasn't dropped faster of further than in comparable developed nations with lower incarceration rates.
Most of Europe never had the crime and murder rates of NYC during the same timeframe. 70s and 80s in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, etc very different than in NYC.
NYC then should see a larger drop then as it reverts to the mean. Those cities may no have had peaks as high as New York, but their peaks were during the same time period. Half of Berlin was in the GDR where heavy handed surveillance networks tracked most residents, so it isn't really comparable.
I wonder if people should consider that "freedom" includes being free of fear and threat. Where I live, even children can go out on the streets at night without a second thought. Without having to fear violence, hate, gangs or the authorities. There is something wrong with a society that prioritizes freedom of speech and the right to carry a gun, over the right to not live in fear and to human dignity.
if you can't advocate for yourself or defend yourself, any freedom from fear or human dignity afforded to you is a happy accident. it may last for a while, but what will you do if things change?
i concede that the sea may change for guns sometime in the next century; they can make things very chaotic as population density increases. still, i maintain that freedom of speech is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for a stable and free society.
Most of the people with heavy lead exposure are now beyond the age for violent crime.
White collar crime is bigger than ever. Today's organized crime operators have better things to do than shake down shopkeepers for protection money, run a numbers racket, or try to resell stolen goods.
As of Dec. 20, police officers intentionally fired their service guns in 23 encounters, a record low, down from 37 in 2016. The Police Department said officers were relying more on stun guns, which were used 491 times through November, compared with 474 times during the same period in 2016.
While I agree that NYC is much safer than when I first moved there five years ago -- threats still pose themselves from time to time (as anywhere will).
For example, I fell asleep for the first time on a 2 train last month, and was robbed. It was one of those, "Ah, this is definitely on me," moments. Easily preventable; however, it's still crime, nonetheless. Most importantly, I didn't report this (as many others in similar situations will not), so the statistics are probably not as accurate as headlines would like you to think.
Having visited Manhattan several times in the last couple of years, I have to say that it does feel like a police state being there. In some senses it's great, because you don't have to worry so much about crime as much, but it also speaks to the police state that NYC and the rest of the US is turning into.
So I'm not surprised that crime has fallen, given the sheer number of police officers present.
NYC is a wonderful and safe place to visit or live. People raised on too many cop shows may miss this. It’s not perfect -no place is - but it is quite safe.
So I've lived in NYC for 7 years now so have some personal experience with this. Note that I live and work in Manhattan so my experience is probably skewed and is only really anecdotal anyway.
My personal experience with the NYPD has been very good.
- As others have noted, heavy police presence in heavily frequented areas, particularly by tourists.
- During Sandy I was in the area without power. At night a police cruiser would go down my street every couple of hours (IIRC) with the lights on but no siren, I guess looking for looters.
- I had a car alarm go off at 1:30am early Sunday morning right outside my window. While I was figuring out what to do and calling 311, a police van turned up (around 1:50am) and broke into the car and disabled the alarm. I went out to speak to the officers and they said just call my local precinct and any unattended car alarm is cause for the police to come up (defined as >10 minutes).
That all being said, there's a pretty dark side to policing and the criminal justice system in NYC too, most notably in the treatment of minorities. Some examples:
- New York's ridiculous gravity knife law [1], which seems to be used by police selectively to target minorities. The New York legislature has now twice overwhelmingly passed reforms only to have this (now twice) vetoed by Governor Cuomo on thin justification [2]. One can only presume he's kowtowing to the law and order crowd.
- Alleged racial bias in pedestrian stops, seemingly often under the guise of seeking a mysterious African-American male suspect in his 20s who is 5' 10" (which can be pretty much anyone).
- The appalling case of Three Years in Riker's Island Without a Trial [3], as win-rate obsessed prosecutors use stalling tactics, the imbalance of power, the ignorance of suspects and plea deals to deny people due process.
- The arrest of James Blake [4].
- Chokehold death of Eric Garner [5] for a relatively minor offense.
It's surprising to hear this within the context of Chicago experiencing such high levels of homicide. Do they give any context as to why NYC is out performing other large cities?
> A 2015 study by Rutgers University public policy researcher Paul A. Jargowsky found that more than a third of all poor African-Americans in Chicago live in census tracts with poverty rates above 40 percent, compared with 26 percent of poor African-Americans in New York.
The headline news about Chicago homicides and shootigns (e.g. "WAR ZONE: 10 Killed, 28 WOunded in Chicago Over MLK Day Weekend [0]) don't convey how concentrated the violence is in specific areas of the city. I visit (middle-class) friends who live downtown and uptown (along the lake) and it feels as safe as any of the nice parts of Manhattan when I lived there.
Chicago Tribune does an excellent job tracking shootings [1]. You can easily see -- after zooming in a little -- on even their overplotted dot map that areas other than Chicago's west and south sides, shootings are virtually nonexistent:
Poverty is nevertheless a factor, but it is usually a result of segregation. When public funding such as education, infrastructure, healthcare, and police are take away from these segregated, poor, high-crime communities to "safer, richer" communities, then gangs rise.
Popular culture portrays most gang members are African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, and whites are generally bikers (and they usually live in south/mid-west). That kind of stereotype only makes crime situation worse.
In NYC, at least from my experience, a diverse neighborhoods - influx of different cultures and races, different earning incomes, and different religious can help smooth out the tension. Diversity is not a magic bullet, and in some neighborhoods we don't see a big drop. Yet, a diverse neighborhoods have better chance in demanding for better resource distribution, so in the long-term the neighborhood will drive the bad out as the bad has little to feed on.
So the key is to remove segregation, have more diverse voice, and encourage neighbors talk to one another other.
Segregation seems like the most salient factor to me. NYC is seeing an almost unbelievable amount of re-integration of previously all-black areas. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the U.S. that's seen such a broad change in its black neighborhoods. In places like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Central Harlem, the white share of population has increased from 1-4 percent or so in 2000 (i.e. basically non-existent) to anywhere from 10-25% (depending on the exact area and how you break it up).
And growing.
Segregation has been a disaster for black neighborhoods. More than anything else, this change feels to me like a big one.
Right. I graduated from City College, which is located at 137th, basically Harlem for those that don’t live in NYC. There have been robberies and rapes near the school (145th and St. Nicholas Park), but generally, I felt very safe when I was a student there (I have walked north of Harlem and south to Columbia by myself before too). Crimes will never cease to happen, so one can only wish not not becoming that unfortunate target. However, the violence in the old days is pretty much non-existence. Some shootings every so often, but most arrests are probably robberies, sexual crimes and illegal drugs possessions.
Housing in Queens and Brooklyn are becoming less affordable. Then business owners like Chinese resturants and retail franchises are moving in to snatch the new population. The 1,2,3 trains are convenient to travel from and to Manhattan, so ideal for university students and young singles.
It's great that there's de-segregation and I agree with your sentiments.
On the flipside there's a backlash, in the form of a knee-jerk anti-gentrification sentiment that rapidly escalates on racial terms. Both politically (community board priorities and attitudes) and on the street - there's a lot of hostility towards newcomers.
That one's incredibly complex. What you laud as desegregation, many in Bed Stuy, etc. would call displacement.
> Yet, a diverse neighborhoods have better chance in demanding for better resource distribution
I think what you see when you have new populations come in (be they foreign or domestic) is "gentrification". The newcomers can instigate redevelopment and reinvigorate a neighborhood. Sometimes this result is not well received by some locals, but usually other locals with some interest in the community welcome the newcomers.
>> Chicago apparently has greater concentrations of poverty, particularly among African-Americans
So how does that explain Detroit, which has more poverty than Chicago, but also has a NYC-like downswing in homicides?
In metro Detroit, 49% of African Americans who are poor are living in census tracts where at least 40% of the residents are poor, the highest rate among the Top 25 metro areas
While Chicago has notably huge upticks from 2014 through 2016, they're also still at relative historic lows compared to past decades. And even with the dramatic upticks in 2015 and 2016 (crime rates appear to drop in 2017), Chicago is still well below Detroit's rates:
I'm sure poverty and demographics, nor the police force and policy, aren't the only factors when comparing NYC and Chicago, although they are easier to quantify.
I strongly suspect you need more than poverty or racial ghettos to get a crime epidemic. You need a culture of criminality combined with one or more criminal industries to make it a viable "career choice."
I really wish crime statistics would be broken down by apparent motive (if known). That might actually tell us something.
Why would you want to have strong suspicions on such a complex topic?
One of the reasons racial ghettos have such an effect on crime is that violence can be driven by young people who can see opportunity near them, and who believe they don’t have access to those opportunities.
Understandable don’t you think? And it doesn’t require a culture of criminality. Just visibility into a differential of access.
As a side note, I hear this “culture of criminality” idea a lot, but I haven’t seen any science around it. Can you point me in the right direction?
And yet that specific metric for Detroit -- "lowest number of criminal homicides in 40 years" -- is virtually useless as it doesn't account for Detroit's massive population decline.
- Detroit having ~300 homicides is very good compared to the
~400 homicides it had in 2000. However, that doesn't quite match up to its population decline. The homicide rate in 2000 was ~41.6 per 100K, compared to 43+ in 2014 (and 2015 and 2016 I think).
- Meanwhile, Chicago's 2014 homicide rate was 15.2. In 2015, it was 17.5. And in 2016, it jumped to 27.8 [0]
That jump is a huge jump compared to historic trends. But still a relative low for Chicago when considering 1990-forward. According to the Tribune's homicide tracker, the number of homicides in 2016 was 792 [1]. In 2017, it's tracking to be 664 homicides, which would be a rate of ~23/100K. Still not great but seems too early to say that Chicago is on an unchanging course of increasing crime. And it doesn't make much sense to argue but what about Detroit? when comparing Chicago to NYC.
It is a two year trend. Sure, it needs to be explained, but it isn't like some Chicago is some hellhole as it is often portrayed by certain media outlets and politicians. If you look at the 2014 crime statistics, Chicago has a lower crime rate than Minneapolis. Chicago was like #20 in crime rate.
I think Chicago has participated in the nationwide trend of a mid-1990s-to-present decrease in violent crime. I think the idea that some people have that it's "American carnage" is an exaggeration.
a fairly common sentiment is to "assume everyone is armed" because guns are otherwise pretty common. In NYC it is safe to assume people are not armed, which is totally different from every other part of the US.
This isn't surprising at all for anyone who has read Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. The decline of violence is a ongoing trend in the species.
Manhattan has increasingly become a gated community since the city neared bankruptcy in the '70s and the banks slowly negotiated more power in running things (as explained in Adam Curtis' 'Hyper-normalization' video essay). It's arguable that the NYPD has almost become a private security force for the city's wealthy residents, given how thin the presence is in places like The Bronx and East New York.
These numbers are for the entire city, not just Manhattan. The bad old days of the late 70s-early 90s are over, just accept it. It's weird how hard some people fight good news.
The figures don't tell the story of all of the burroughs. Can you convince a cab to take you to the Bronx after 10 pm? I've had quite a few drivers tell me that they refuse to go there.
Btw, the 'mourning old New York' thing pisses me off as well, as things have moved on and it's a welcome change that crime is down in Manhattan. I'm observing, not judging, when I say that the the city is playground for the rich.
I've had no trouble taking cabs and ubers to and from the bronx at least a dozen of times (and in particular the south bronx) at all hours of the night and all days of the week. A few times it was an uber pool that had other riders in it (meaning they managed to find a cab too).
Coincidentally, I was just talking to a hack about this a couple of days ago. We came to the conclusion that 311 put alot of the issue of cabs refusing rides to bed. They aren't allowed to refuse a fare based on destination, and if you report them to 311 they will be fined by the TLC. That's not to say it doesn't happen anymore, but the threat of retribution has changed this for the better.
In fact, crime in the whole country is down dramatically from what it was in 1990. So unless the poor are being deported, something else must explain the drop in crime.
