Photo du Jour 516
Welcome Back! Um, Why Are You at Work Today?
Tiger Woods In "Serious" Condition After Car Crash
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Photos from Black Friday
Builder of Oakland's Fox Theater Once Imprisoned For 'White Slavery'
Last Friday, the Examiner got their hands on a bunch of statistics and a calculator and crunched a whole bunch of numbers about crime in the city. Their verdict is that curiously, the number of homicides has gone up but the number of people arrested for said homicides has gone down. It doesn't take a math major to realize that's not very good.
So here's the numbers: in the three years that Gavin has been Mayor and Heather Fong the Police Commissioner, San Francisco has averaged 90 homicides and 23.5 homicide arrests a year. That's about 25 percent. For comparison, under Willie and his Police Commissioner, Fred Lau, there was an average homicide rate of 65 homicides a year with thirty-two arrests for homicide. That's a little under 50% percent.
Okay, so here's where we bust out our High School remedial math class to give you a visual low down of how this thing would work. If one were to look at this in chart form, one line would be shooting up to the upper right hand corner while another line would be shooting down to the lower-right hand corner. We think the technical mathematical term for this would be "not very good."
Also, neighborhoods that have seen new crime fighting initiatives introduced-- Bayview, Western Addition and Mission districts-- have had the number of homicides remain constant or have increased. Similarly, neighborhoods that haven't been the focus of police crime fighting measures have had a decrease in violent crime.
Okay, in Gavin and Heather's defense, murder rates are up everywhere, not just in San Francisco. And the number of homicides did drop from 2005 to 2006. It's just that those numbers are still much higher than before. Also, not-so violent crimes like robbery and burglaries are down.
It's things like this that are the reasons for all the verbal noogies between the Board of Supervisors, the SFPD, and the Mayor. In fact, we went to do a search through SFist for stories about said conflict and got so many that we decided to not link to any of them because we're lazy. But you remember when the police showed up wearing t-shirts making fun of Chris Daly? Good times...good times. Anyways, the Examiner, however, does provide a decent recap of anti-crime measures the city has been trying as well as the battles between Gavin and the Supes.
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You know what could lower the homicide rate? A $20 bridge toll. Seriously. People come here to shoot each other just like they come here to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. It's ridiculous.
Memo to people: please do not come to San Francisco for any of the following reasons:
1) You'd like to kill somebody on Eddy Street
2) You're planning to shoot up a bar in Japantown
3) You would like to fire into a crowd on Halloween
4) You are on an extended binge of road rage
5) Any other type of trip where you would bring a firearm
Thanks,
San Franciscans
I'm sorry but crime is not down in this frigging city. People are just fed up with waiting 9 hours for a cruiser to respond to his or her non-emergency car burglary. What's down are reports. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to back me up on that one too. Just one: my friend's slashed convertible top discovered a mere few hours after parking briefly on the street at Folsom and 11th. Did he report it? No, of course not because they told him it would be "a while" before someone could come out and take the report and he would have to wait there for them. Forget it and get insurance.
This stat tells me that, if so inclined, I can get away with murder in this city. I just have to pick out my gang colors so the cops stay away from me.
What I'm tired of, in addition to crime, are people who blame all of SF's violence on "other" people who don't live in San Francisco.
You have a nice little list there, Jeffrey Baker, but there is one mistake I see. The haloween shooting in the Castro was between two SAN FRANCISCO gangs. One from Lakeview (or Oceanview, or Ingleside, whatever you want to call it), and the other from the Sunnydale projects in Vis Valley. Gangs from these two hoods have been shooting each other up for a long, long time.
I'm tired of elitist snobs who think SF is perfect, and that any problem must be the fault of outsiders. People who think like that often ARE the outsiders/transplants, etc...
Yes, criminals "commute" and many come to SF, but People from SF go to Oakland, East Palo Alto or Richmond to shoot other people as well.