Last Wednesday, San Francisco woke to shocking news of the death of Bob Lee, the 43-year-old founder of the popular Cash App. Police had found Lee overnight suffering from multiple stab wounds on a sidewalk in the city’s Rincon Hill neighborhood. He was transported to a hospital, where he died.
For days, law enforcement officials stayed mum on the circumstances around the case, and the San Francisco mayor, London Breed, urged residents not to jump to conclusions.
But the killing of a well-known and by all accounts beloved tech executive on a city street promptly reignited arguments that San Francisco is unsafe. National headlines once again focused on the city’s massive homelessness emergency, drug crisis and high-profile retail thefts, with pundits and some prominent voices in tech, including Elon Musk, demanding a course correction.
On Thursday, police announced they had detained Nima Momeni, an Emeryville tech entrepreneur who reportedly knew Lee, on suspicion of murder. The arrest upended the narrative that Lee had become the victim of a city wrecked by crime, but the killing, and the public outcry that followed, highlighted the pressure San Francisco public officials face when it comes to public safety.
“It is the top issue facing San Francisco right now,” said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson with the mayor’s office. “In terms of the issues most impacting San Francisco, public safety is the top. We have the work we’re doing around the economy and downtown and office vacancy rates – but even in that area public safety is the number one.”
Violent crime in San Francisco has been declining since the 1990s, and the city has a lower violent crime rate than other major US cities, according to FBI data compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle. Like many major American cities, San Francisco saw an uptick in homicides during the pandemic, from 41 in 2019 to 56 last year, with lower-income Black and Latino communities bearing the brunt of the violence. But the city records far more property crime than violent acts such as murder, rape and assault, the data shows.
Still, local leaders acknowledge many residents don’t feel safe. “It’s no consolation to say San Francisco had three times as many murders in the 1970s,” said Joel Engardio, who sits on the county’s governing body, the board of supervisors, in a statement following Lee’s death. “What matters is how people feel today and they don’t feel safe.”
Nearly half of San Francisco residents have reported being the victim of a crime in recent years. In a poll of 1,653 residents last year conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle, 45% of respondents said an item had been stolen from them in the last five years and almost a quarter said they had been threatened or attacked in the same period. The large homelessness and addiction crisis in the city, coupled with an emptier downtown struggling to rebound from the pandemic, has contributed to people’s feelings of unease.
“If you just look at pure numbers you can argue statistically but that doesn’t speak to how people are feeling and what people are experiencing on the streets on a daily basis,” said Ahsha Safaí, a city supervisor who represents the Excelsior and Oceanview neighborhoods. Residents are anxious and frustrated, he said, pointing to the recent attack on a former fire commissioner, youth brawls in a shopping mall and frequent break-ins at cannabis dispensaries.
“People feel like brazen crime is out of control in San Francisco and the truth is that there is a lot of brazen crime happening on a daily basis.”
The Chronicle’s editorial board in September described the city as “simmering in organic, home-grown discontent” born of the “failure of leadership to meaningfully improve conditions on the ground, particularly as it relates to homelessness, public safety and housing”.
Frustration over the lack of progress in tackling those challenges has fueled calls for change and prompted a new wave of organizing. Last year, residents recalled Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive district attorney, who had been elected on promises to hold police accountable and undo the harms of the criminal justice system. Proponents of the recall campaign, backed by wealthy donors, argued that crime was out of control and called for harsher punishments.
“Boudin was elected in a post-Black Lives Matter moment when the issues of police brutality and outright oppression of marginalized communities was a salient thing for a lot of voters,” said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. “But there was a reaction against that. Some of it is politics and some of it is people feeling a sense of lawlessness during and after the pandemic.”
San Francisco’s voters are looking for effective governance and a sense of public safety, McDaniel argued. “The perception among political leaders is that voters want more action, they want to be less oppositional toward police. They want to be less accepting of public disorder and lawlessness.”
Mayor Breed has said her office is committed to improving public safety across San Francisco. The board of supervisors recently approved Breed’s proposal to spend an additional $25m on police overtime to alleviate a staffing shortage. This year the board unanimously approved a plan backed by Breed allowing nonprofits to operate privately funded supervised drug-use sites, also called overdose prevention sites – months after the city reportedly halted plans for similar sites.
Last month the mayor asked the US attorney for help from the federal government to tackle open-air drug markets in the city.
“Our local law enforcement is doing its best to enforce against drug dealing, however the scale of the problem is beyond our local capacity,” Breed wrote in her letter. “We need additional and ongoing support from the Department of Justice to arrest and prosecute drug dealers so residents, families and workers feel safe in their neighborhoods.”
The district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, who argued that her progressive predecessor did not set a tone “where criminal offenders understand there’s accountability and consequences”, pledged to go after the city’s fentanyl dealers and hold those who break the law accountable . The city doesn’t “tolerate these horrific acts of violence”, she said about Lee’s death.
Safaí, the city supervisor, said the challenges the city is facing are significant. “Our entire emergency response system is struggling,” he noted, adding that resources were being focused on the downtown core and areas heavily populated by tourists.
“I absolutely support [more resources downtown] but not at the expense of our neighborhoods. When many of our neighborhood police stations are understaffed that means our response times are slow,” he said. “We need officers all over the city right now, not just in the downtown core.”
Hillary Ronen, a progressive on the board of supervisors who represents the Mission district, said the city won’t make headway without addressing the root causes of crime, including poverty.
“Whether or not there is an increase in violent crime, people are not feeling safe because of the signs of visible poverty and chaos on the streets,” she said. “The best way to have a safe community is to make sure we all have our basic needs met.
“I’m trying to address things directly. I think mostly what we’re seeing in San Francisco and around the country, not just the city, [are] the consequences of decades of inequality … When you have poverty on the level we have in this country and this city, you’re gonna see the type of problems we see on our streets in San Francisco.”
As calls for intervention intensify, Tinisch Hollins, the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group, warned against the politicization of public safety and argued that officials should put forth solutions that improve the health of San Francisco and support crime victims.
“There’s absolutely an issue with public safety but that’s an issue in every major city,” she said. “I think that when these high-profile incidents happen it becomes a political narrative, but the conversation we should be having is around the health of the city.”
Violence is a public health issue, she continued, arguing that the city will need to invest in resources beyond policing in order to prevent crime.
