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Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar.
I realize this topic has been fraught with it from the beginning, but even by that relative standard the comment was particularly bad.
Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#452[flagged]
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for that. I admit to buying the narrative. Part of that is because my nearest city of any substance is Portland, and it's not especially violent. SF does look more violent compared to Portland, but objectively SF is actually just average or less. Lots of big cities are more violent[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
I grew up in a violent town (high murder rate - even blatant). The difference between that and SF is that you don’t personally experience that violence in my home town. It’s really quite rare it affects someone you know. It’s even rarer for it to be direct. SF is different. Within my first year there i had already seen someone shot in front my building (i didn’t witness it but the aftermath). An asian friend was slap…
I grew up outside of one of the most violent cities in New York State[1]. My high school was right in the middle of Newburgh, NY, and being a teenager, I spent a lot of time driving around the downtown area at night. There were a handful of blocks you stayed away from and you were good. Granted, this is with the benefit of a car, rather than walking around.
Ultimately, random acts of violence are scary but even in the "most dangerous cities" statistically rare. The politicization of city violence "What about Chicago? What about SF?" is an instant red flag that whomever you're speaking with is making a bad faith argument.
[1]: https://hudsonvalleypost.com/hudson-valley-city-among-most-d...
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#454Watch how fast this falls out of the news cycle because it doesn’t align with America’s view of San Francisco. So far I’ve heard it was: a homeless person, a junkie, mentally ill, violent criminal common to San Francisco. Part of me felt this was personal. A stabbing you have to get fairly close. Bob Lee could know his killer. And I don’t know him well enough to know who he hung out with.
Unless a pic comes out of Momeni (the alleged stabber) dressed in drag, then this news will drag out for a long time, pun intended.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. It's the opposite of what this site is supposed to be for.
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#455When I moved to SF in 1996, the murder count that year was 86. Last year it was 56. I haven't been back in a very long time, but I guarantee you it's a far safer city than it was back then. I lived on Market between 6th and 7th and had knives pulled on me, and watched a car get blown up across the street underneath Hollywood Billiards, which is long gone now - according to Google Maps, they're building new apartments…
> The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy
I worked in the Warfield building from 2014 to 2017. It wasn't deep in the TL, but it still numbed me to things. Crossing police tape to get into the office? NBD. Coworkers getting assaulted? Happens every few months.
> Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go
If you said something like this about The Mission, I'd agree, but the TL wasn't even close to gentrifying. People tried to make it happen, but it never got to a point where people wanted to be there, and that was only at its periphery.
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#456[flagged]
> The fact is if he wasn’t in San Francisco, he wouldn’t have been killed.
Does this hypothesis apply only to Bob Lee or to anyone? Because if it applies to any human, then it’s so readily falsifiable that I’m surprised anyone would propose it.
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in doubt if is ethical journalism reveal the name and LinkedIn profile of an alleged killer, sounds like doxing to me.
Arrests sure better be public record in a free country.
It’s fundamental to the principles of habeas corpus that the overwhelming power of the government to arrest, prosecute, and imprison someone be wielded in broad daylight.
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as other folks in this topic are pointing out, anecdotes like that are simply misleading. San Francisco is not a high crime US city. Period. It is not. It is middle-of-the-pack at worst. Nor is it getting "worse faster". It saw a crime wave across the pandemic that is receding now, just like most of the world. It's just wrong. You're wrong. Any narrative to the effect of "SF is unsafe because of ..." is wrong, be…
> SF is not unsafe in any measurable way. Well, no. SF is not unsafe in any measured way. You can easily observe from this thread, anecdotally, the police routinely ignore people shouting threats and other crimes. It's entirely possible that if we actually measured all of those, and counted them as the crimes that they are, that SF would look remarkably worse.
Do police measure "shouting threats and other crimes" anywhere, though? You're literally inventing a new category of crime just to be able to claim SF is the worst. Isn't the Occam explanation here that... you're just wrong?
Blunt counter-hypothesis: Tech bros are a bunch of suburban snowflakes who never lived in a dense urban environment before and are addressing their culture clash with hate instead of understanding. This is anecdotally true in my experience, which means I'm right by your logic, no?
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#459This news really highlights the confirmation bias that was in full bloom throughout the "discourse" around the initial reports of Lee's murder (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899 ). Everyone is so quick to jump on negative news about the rare violent crime in e.g. SF thanks to feelings about petty property crime that it's obviously impossible to have any kind of fact-based dialogue about policy. Worth…
Yeah the exact same thing happens with Portland every time it pops up on here. The HN audience by and large irrationally hates progressive policies and cities with them. It’s weird watching people here parrot the opinions of the corporate overlords.
I don't think this is a great representation of what's going on.
There are many legitimate problems in Portland. If you go on any online discussion you'll see residents showcasing them. Those threads get barraged by liberals and conservatives that don't live here either defending or attacking the issue at hand. None of this is helpful.
I wish you could hear the frustration in my voice. Frustration at the Progressive Party for picking ideology over the health of the city, frustration at the right for turning our local issues into national showcases, frustration with the people in the comments who think commenting on the goings on of a city they don't live in is anything but a bad faith take.
I am tired. I want Progressives and Republicans gone, and from what I can see I'm part of a growing group in this city. We'll solve our own problems in due time, extremists can get lost.
Re: Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
#460When I moved to SF in 1996, the murder count that year was 86. Last year it was 56. I haven't been back in a very long time, but I guarantee you it's a far safer city than it was back then. I lived on Market between 6th and 7th and had knives pulled on me, and watched a car get blown up across the street underneath Hollywood Billiards, which is long gone now - according to Google Maps, they're building new apartments…
"Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go"
1.) I grew up in the rural South, and was literally harassed for most of my career for saying "y'all" and "folks" but glad to see it's trendy to speak that way amongst the exact kind of people who used to assume I was ignorant for speaking that way.
2.) Your statement could just as easily be, on a different day: "Y'all abandoned the city for the suburbs and deprived the city of a tax base to help the poor." Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Same applies to livability: If you demand quality of life crimes be dealt with to make a city cleaner, you are guilty of not "embracing where we were and not trying to change it".
Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion and nostalgia without thinking about the fact that there are low income children who have to grow up in these places. Maybe parents aren't thrilled with having their 10 year olds learn the valuable life lessons of "how to not get knifed by a junkie in an alleyway".
Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs. I've personally (in DC) been mugged at gunpoint (they threw me onto the pavement in the process) and had a random guy jump out of his car to assault me because I walked in front of his car in heavy traffic (all cars stopped) to cross a street, and he viewed it as "disrespecting him".
Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor. Beliefs like that are luxuries for certain kinds of people who are insulated from the worst of it, one way or another. It's easy for a childless bohemian to have no problem with needles in parks, but for those of us raising future citizens, it's not fun.