In my never-ending search for why San Francisco is such a basket case, I came across this table:
So we’ve got high crime, lots of police department staff, and low crime clearance rates. First thought: what’s wrong with the cops in San Francisco? Maybe nothing. Let me explain, starting with some relevant context.
Pre-Covid Facts and Figures for Daily Population Flows in San Francisco
The San Francisco City and County (“San Francisco”) population was 874,961 in 2019 and 873,965 in 2020 (Census Bureau).
San Francisco received 26.2 million visitors in 2019, an average of 71,805 a day (San Francisco Travel Association).
San Francisco received a daily average of 351,320 inbound work commuters from outside counties in 2018, representing 46% of the city’s workforce (Bay Area Economics Institute).
An average of 456,000 vehicles entered San Francisco per day in 2018 (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency).
A daily average of 184,647 weekday BART riders exited in San Francisco during Fiscal Year 2019 (Bay Area Rapid Transit-BART).
Approximately 13.1% of San Francisco County residents are noncitizens and are especially vulnerable to being undercounted (San Francisco County Fact Sheet).
Homelessness in San Francisco County is also prevalent. Reaching homeless individuals during the standard three-day window to count them makes it difficult for the Census Bureau to ensure an accurate count (San Francisco County Fact Sheet).
San Francisco City and County’s land area is 47 square miles, compared to 4,207 square miles for San Diego County and 965 square miles for Sacramento County (Census Bureau).
Bottom line
There are a lot more people in San Francisco on any given day than its counted permanent residents. This is more true of San Francisco than the other cities in the above table, thanks largely to its huge number of commuters and tourists, an average of 423,125 people a day - almost half the number of permanent residents.
And by “people”, I mean potential criminal offenders and victims. Note, though, that crime rates and police staffing ratios are based only on the city’s permanent resident population. If commuters and tourists were incorporated into the formulas for calculating San Francisco’s crime rate and police staffing ratios, the numbers wouldn’t look so bad. Not good but at least not as awful as is currently the case. As Neighborhood Scout explains in How do you define crime rates in highly-touristed areas?:
“Crime rates can appear higher than expected if there are a lot of tourists (non-permanent residents) in your community, because the number of crimes (violent, property, or both) are divided by the permanent population, creating a crime rate per 1,000 residents. If there are a lot of visitors, these people can increase the number of crimes, but do not count in establishing the rate because they don't permanently reside there, thus increasing the crime rate per 1,000 residents.”
The same reasoning applies to police staffing. Add a daily average of 423,125 transient residents to San Francisco’s official population and suddenly the city’s police staffing ratio drops from 3.5 personnel per 1,000 residents to 2.4 per 1,000 - not excessive at all, especially for a city with so many attractive features for the criminally-inclined. These features include: density of tourists, shoppers from other areas, opportunities to consume alcohol, and the presence of nearby interstate highway exits (Jarrell & Howsen, 1990). Sounds like San Francisco to me.
If it is indeed the case that many offenders in San Francisco are from out of town, that might explain the SFPD’s low clearance rate: it in well-established that crimes committed by strangers have a lower clearance rate than crimes committed by people the victim knows (Vaughn, 2020). Especially when those strangers have quick access to freeways.
I’ll end with this extended quote from Breed to Out-of-Town Criminals: 'Don't Come to Our City with All That Bulls**t' by Jay Barmann in SFist:
“In her recorded comments, San Francisco Mayor London Breed seemed to be addressing criminals who come into San Francisco from elsewhere around the Bay to commit crimes — even though several high-profile incidents recently involved suspects who live here.
‘When you come to San Francisco with the expectation to harm somebody here in this city, there will be consequences,’ Breed said. ‘So really don't come to our city with all that bullshit because we're not having it.’
So, Breed's rhetorical threats to criminals coming to our city implies that some crimes are being committed by out-of-town suspects — perhaps stuff like break-ins. But there haven't been any published stats on where thieves or violent criminals are coming from.”
It’s time to start collecting and publishing those stats.
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References:
Jarrell, S. and Howsen, R.M. (1990), Transient Crowding and Crime: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 49: 483-494. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.1990.tb02476.x
Vaughn, P. E. (2020). "The effects of devaluation and solvability on crime clearance." Journal of Criminal Justice 68: 101657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2020.101657