Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco

Speaking as an immigrant - Worked in SF most of last decade. Left in 2018. Crime was on a steady uptick while I was there. Once in the Bart, a young man grabbed a cellphone from the guy seated right next to me & bolted out of the train. The train started, and the cellphone owner gave chase. The Bart police arrived soon after, with guns pointed straight at the passengers. The robber was fast and jumped over the turnstile & got away with the cellphone. I felt like I was like in a cops and robbers movie. People are trying to peacefully commute to work and instead you are subjected to guns in your face because of some shiny iphone. Rest of the train trip was some heated political debate between the left & the left-left, arguing what should be done. The left wanted to integrate the youth into the tech community by offering free coding classes so they wouldn't rob cellphones. The left-left argued for free iphones for everybody. I was like, hey how about catching the robber & some jailtime, which is what they'd have done where I come from. Ofcourse I didn't actually say anything, I don't feel comfortable talking about your politics.

I work in a suburb in the rural midwest now. Neighborhoodscout says my odds are 1 in 1100. So my chances of being a victim have improved from 1 in 18 to 1 in 1100. How does it feel ? 8 year old kids here bike to school a mile away, snow or shine, no cps, nothing. As to property crime - once we went away for the weekend & the garage door acted up in our absence. So for a whole 3 days, the garage was wide open & anybody could have walked in & grabbed whatever. Nothing was taken. On the contrary there was a nice note from the neighbor about applying grease on the railing so the garage door stays closed.

So if you are an immigrant & safety is a priority, yeah there are many towns in the midwest southwest etc. where you can be very safe. Houses are quite cheap & I was able to buy my house with straight cash, but ironically that cash was earned in SF! Indeed, I now get paid 4x less than what I made as a programmer back in SF.

So yeah, from an immigrant pov, it looks like in this country you first have to pay your dues. Work in some high-crime zone like SF,NYC etc, accumulate capital. Then move to some peaceful rural place in the midwest with no crime & no nothing. We don't even have a mall.

It comes from a few things:

1. Rent has become insanely expensive such that a lot of people end up no the streets. This is the cause of the tent cities popping up, and really are a small part of what people have a problem with. The "invisible" homeless.

2. We do not have any resources for people who are too mentally ill or too sick to be of any "use" to society. A lot of those people end up on the street, where they are vulnerable to manipulation to start using heroin. A lot of them have mental disabilities. No, we do not have mental hospitals, and the ones that do exist are full, and they are not hurrying to build more.

3. We have a massive heroin addiction epidemic. These are the people who are crawling all over the place trying to get their fix, mugging people in the fugue states between scraping enough money together to get their next fix. The "highly visible" homeless.

So. Something like 0.17% of our population is homeless. That is like 600k people.

Imagine what it will take get these people off the streets and reintegrated into society, if that is even possible.

They need:

1. Shelter.

2. Food.

3. Medical professionals to help them come down from the high, and help them get on a better path to stop using drugs.

4. Security to prevent re-victimization.

5. Legal authority to detain them without their consent ( a lot of homeless people have schizophrenia and are extremely paranoid and do not trust anyone ).

Imagine how much that will cost.

The US government is extremely austere around funding this stuff, so it has been left up to the cities and states, which do not have the resources to tackle the problem.

So that is really it. It's too expensive, and all the money is pooled into the top .1% of the population, and we don't tax them, and they are busy building rocket ships, so we don't have any money to fix the issue.

Some people want the cops to arrest them but that is actually MORE expensive and MORE prone to failure, other ethical issues aside. ( of which there are many )

Per FBI Crime Report statistics[1] the murder rate in SF is LOW for a major city.

It's 60th of 83 major cities (Top 3 most dangerous are St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit).

I defined murder rate as "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" / "Population" and "major city" as "Population > 250k."

PS: Someone should update Wikipedia; its numbers appear outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... [2]

Comparing Texas to a single city isn't really the most honest thing to do.

Texas has a higher gun HOMICIDE rate than California, per-capita, btw. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

Unsure what you're really trying to solve!

> top comment is saying to not talk about SF politics

The top comment says not to only talk about SF politics, but also share some memories of the deceased. It's followed by a thousand posts discussing SF politics. Let's not pretend the politics are being ignored here.