The way San Francisco deals with crime is caught these days between perception and reality — or two different realities, something SFPD Chief Bill Scott, wittingly or not, made clear in a Board of Supervisors hearing on Feb. 8.
“It’s not about arresting the people who need help, it’s about what the community is complaining about,” Scott said, describing the thin line cops are supposed to navigate in cracking down on drug crimes while following city policies around substance use that emphasize public health and treatment, not criminalization.
Scott was speaking about Mayor London Breed’s ongoing “state of emergency” in the Tenderloin, but he just as easily could have been hauled in front of the supervisors to explain his force’s use of force (or lack thereof) in other situations. (Just a few weeks after Scott’s comments, Breed’s administration vowed more arrests in the Tenderloin.)
To judge from the chief’s comments, SFPD seems downright besieged, ordered by the mayor to flood the Tenderloin, along with shuffling cops around town to respond to “mass looting,” as well as scrambling to fill holes when COVID outbreaks left the force shorthanded.
Headlines and polls (perhaps driven by each other) also paint a picture of crime out of control: “San Francisco Confronts Crime Wave,” “San Francisco Stores Closing Over Retail Theft,” “Smash & Grab Robbers Terrorize,” all while 80 percent of those surveyed in a June Chamber of Commerce poll believe SF crime has gotten worse in recent years, and 70 percent say quality of life is down.
It’s hard to take issue with the quality of life thing in the middle of a global pandemic. But crime? It’s not true. Crime has actually been declining here for years.
According to SFPD’s own data, overall crime rates have declined every year from 2014 to 2020. In addition, both violent and nonviolent crime reports were down in 2021 from 2019. Compared with 2020, they’re up — only slightly for violent crime — but remember that the pandemic removed many ordinary opportunities for lawbreaking. (One wonders how the guy who used to snatch phones on BART is doing these days.)
Taken in context, 2021’s numbers represent a continuing downward trend, in pretty much exactly the vein we’ve seen for years.
While some headlines may contribute to the sense of being under siege, many media outlets have indeed reported the general downward crime trends. But pointing out that the trends run contrary to perceptions doesn’t appear to make a difference to some of the public.
Cruel world
While San Francisco may be an especially attractive target for demagogues, talking heads, and trolls for its progressive image and public values, the rigidity of perceptions about SF against the reality is not something that’s unique to our city. Pollsters, statisticians, and social scientists testify that most people assume social problems everywhere are always getting worse, even if shown otherwise.
“It comes up all the time — I’m like, ‘No, there’s no crime wave, crime is down, crime has been falling for decades,’” Jeffrey Asher, cofounder of the analysis firm AH Datalytics, tells The Frisc. “But people tend to be pretty bad at judging trends.”
The late communications professor George Gerbner even coined a term for it: “mean world syndrome.” Gerbner (almost quaintly) blamed this attitude on television — an opinion shared by many people I spoke with for this story. “From cradle to grave, you’re surrounded by media,” says University of Illinois journalism professor Nikki Usher. “People are generally pretty bad at judging risk, and people who are heavy consumers of crime [content] tend to think the world is a scarier place” than the data bear out.
Do people really believe what they see and hear in the news? As someone in journalism, that hasn’t been my experience, but some studies show that people tend to trust media when it reinforces what they already want to believe.
Devotees of Fox–OAN–Newsmax programming are more likely to believe that crime is up in San Francisco because it flatters their politics to believe it, and in turn this drives those outlets to keep reporting it. (Compare this to the “poop maps” blowup of a few years ago, which certain outlets made a lot of hay on despite the fact that the underlying data was, well, mostly crap.)
A big category is what I call disorder. Trash on the sidewalks, abandoned cars, untended buildings, these things intensify fears.
Political scientist Wesley Skogan
“A big category is what I call disorder. Trash on the sidewalks, abandoned cars, untended buildings, these things intensify fears,” Skogan observes. Homelessness, for example, is not necessarily an indicator of crime (except in cases where we criminalize common homeless behaviors), but exposure to it creates an impression of undefined badness that affects attitudes about crime.
“It’s the fear scale,” says Ellen Buchman, president of the “social justice lab” the Opportunity Agenda. “The more people are surrounded by narrative or cultural interventions and conversations about crime, the more likely they are to not be in a great position to assess what’s going on.”
And then there’s the fact that not all crimes should necessarily be considered equally. Lisa Miller, professor of political science at Rutgers, says that some crimes just plain matter more. “Right now there is an increase in homicide, even as other types of crime have been going down,” she points out, a trend that is true both in SF and nationally.
SF’s slight one-year uptick in the murder rate does not seem like a huge factor in the face of an overall decline in violent crime — but it probably seems like a big deal if you’re, you know, afraid of being murdered; the smash-and-grab robberies at Union Square are not that significant amid big dips in theft elsewhere, but they’re still frightening.
Gesturing at pie charts in response comes off as out of touch. SF DA Chesa Boudin himself stumbled right into this hazard in a recent interview, blaming individual perspectives and political biases for distorting reality about crime on the streets — an argument that is supported by data, but makes him sound like a snob.
How we cop to this
While Chief Scott might plea he’s besieged from every corner (and no doubt he gets an earful, or perhaps a textful, from the mayor), the supervisors, for all their progressive bona fides, shrugged off post-George Floyd cries of “defund the police” to, in fact, increase the SFPD budget — in part on Breed’s promise to push $120 million of it into SF’s Black community.
In a “letter of inquiry” to Scott last week, Sup. Hillary Ronen alleged that police officers are turning a blind eye to some crimes for political reasons, and that cops are even bemoaning to civilians there’s “no point in investigating or arresting perpetrators.” (An SFPD spokesperson told The Frisc that Scott will respond, but that no reply was available yet.)
Boudin was elected by a slim margin after campaigning for judicial reform, which put a target on his back even before his election. Now he’s working under the threat of recall, an effort fueled in part by the gap between what the crime data say and how many people feel.
As those quality-of-life responses suggest, “crime is up” is often another way to say “society is degrading” — which is not the same thing, but makes the former difficult to reject. It’s as if, in response to Ronald Reagan saying “It’s morning in America,” we got 100 hot takes arguing that it’s only morning for 12 hours at most out of the day. In the court of public opinion, being correct is not quite the same thing as being right.