San Francisco, CA

Source: Bigstock

Some rare good news out of San Francisco: Rookie wide receiver Ricky Pearsall of the NFL 49ers has already been released from the hospital after being shot through the torso during an attempted mugging on Saturday afternoon at Geary Street and Grant Avenue, a block from Union Square, the traditional center of San Francisco’s luxury shopping and tourism district.

It turns out that it’s not wise to try to mug a 23-year-old NFL first-round draft pick, even if, like Pearsall, they are white and only 6’1″ and 189 pounds. This deep threat (4.41 seconds in the 40-yard dash) fought back against the 17-year-old robber. The mugger’s gun went off twice, hitting both Pearsall and his assailant. The bullet went right through Pearsall’s shoulder. The prospect out of U. of Florida walked to the ambulance, still wearing his expensive watch.

I’m planning a book tour trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to promote my anthology Noticing in later October. Not being 23 or a first-round draft pick, Union Square has recently fallen on my priority list of must-see places to visit in the Bay Area.

On my second round of my Noticing book tour, I’ll be visiting Chicago on Sept. 26 and 27. Then, most likely, in October I’ll be going to western Florida; the Washington, D.C., area; and the San Francisco Bay Area.

So, the issue of comparative crime rates is of great interest to me.

Not surprisingly, this mugging has led to much comment on crime in San Francisco. For example, from Twitter:

Yann LeCun
Professor at NYU. Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

Meta (aka Facebook) is headquartered in San Francisco, so Dr. LeCun’s recruiting depends in part upon the city’s reputation. As does NYU’s.

@ylecun

The perception of safety in American cities is disconnected from actual safety.

Most Democrats think all cities are safe except Detroit and Chicago.

They are wrong about New Orleans, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.

Most Republicans think all cities are generally unsafe, except a few Red State cities like Dallas, Houston, and Miami.

They think most Blue State cities are particularly unsafe, except Boston.

Yet, NYC and SF are extremely safe and LA quite safe, while Miami and Atlanta are not.

3 times more Republicans think Dallas is safe compared to NYC, yet the murder rate in Dallas is over 3 times that of NYC.

There are multiple ways to think about how safe a city is from crime:

For instance, while San Francisco is relatively less beset by murder than other cities, it has weirdly high rates of lesser crimes, such as shoplifting, car break-ins, carjackings, and bizarre indigenous crimes such as TV news crews having their cameras stolen while they are on the air.

But, I’ll focus on homicides because those are the most reliably recorded crimes.

Consider opportunity cost. While San Francisco is less homicide-ridden than, say, Milwaukee, San Francisco, the richest city in America and perhaps the world, ought to be a utopia, not the dysfunctional mess it often seems to be. Similarly, the high murder rate in Washington, D.C., is shameful for the nation’s capital.

Assuming the microstate of Monaco is a city, it would be a major competitor with San Francisco and Dubai for the title of the richest city in the world. I haven’t been to Monte Carlo since 1980, but it looked like utopia then, and I presume it still does. Monaco has had one murder from 1960 and 2022 (a billionaire who apparently was murdered by his nurse for ridiculous reasons), so its murder rate is perhaps 1/20th of San Francisco’s.

Alternatively, you can think about a city’s crime problem from a Rawlsian Veil-of-Ignorance standpoint: If all I knew is I’d live my whole life in one city, which city would I choose for the stork to drop me off in at random as a baby?

Let’s compare the CDC’s report of homicide victimization in 2020–2023 for these four counties that I’ll be flying into. (Where my events will be held is still to be determined, but I’ll focus on the central cities.) The CDC reports by county, so we are talking, roughly, about San Francisco; the District of Columbia; Hillsborough County, Florida (Tampa); and Cook County, Illinois (Chicago and inner suburbs).

Compare the average risk of homicide in 2020–2023 in San Francisco (5.5 homicides per 100k) versus the comparably wealthy District of Columbia (30.2).

So, if Rawls’ Stork dropped you for life in D.C. rather than in S.F., you’d be 5.5 times as likely to die violently.

Of course, much of that difference is due to the huge racial differences between the two locations. Even the gentrifying District of Columbia is still 41 percent black in 2020, while San Francisco is merely 5 percent black, down from 13 percent black in 1970, back in Dirty Harry’s day.

Americans have unrealistic attitudes because the media keeps covered up the fundamental fact needed to understand gun crime in America: that young black men have extraordinarily higher homicide rates (both perpetrating and suffering) than anybody else. In this decade, the black murder offending rate across the country has been about an order of magnitude higher than the white rate.

And that raises the question of whether Rawls’ Stork can change your race. If your parents decided to raise you in Washington rather than in San Francisco, or vice versa, it’s pretty easy to imagine you’d be more or less the same person in both places. Thus, this is a pretty good thought experiment for contemplating the effects of nurture upon you.

But if your parents were different people, wouldn’t you be a different person, a really different person? Especially if your parents’ ancestors had diverged several tens of thousands of years ago during an Out of Africa event?

The homicide death rate among blacks is rather similar: 53.6 in San Francisco vs. 65.8 in the District of Columbia.

In contrast, the white homicide victimization rate in S.F. is only 1.4 (1/38th the black rate) and 0.6 in D.C. (1/112th the black rate).

An interesting question is how much of that 23 percent higher black homicide death rate in D.C. than in S.F. is due to blacks in Washington in daily life encountering blacks far more often than blacks in San Francisco encounter other blacks. If you randomly interact with twenty people per day, in San Francisco one would be black on average. In contrast, in Washington’s county, eight would be black.

This seems like a study that somebody ought to do: How much does the black homicide victimization rate go up just from greater exposure to blacks in densely black places like D.C.?

In D.C., the white homicide victimization rate is lower than in San Francisco: 0.6 vs. 1.4. However, the CDC’s WONDER database of the causes of all deaths in the U.S. only records the identity of homicide victims and is mute on the more difficult-to-collect question of homicide perpetrators (the FBI wrestles with that issue). So, we aren’t sure what fraction of the high white homicide death rate in these rich cities is due to black perps.

I’m not certain where we will hold the book tour events in those cities, but trust assured that they are likely to be in bookish (i.e., non-homicidal) parts of each metropolis.