Has crime increased in San Francisco?
The answer is important for two reasons:
1) Progressives, DA Chesa Boudin, and the San Francisco Chronicle, have been claiming that decarceration policies and eliminating felony convictions have not raised the crime rates in San Francisco, and
2) SFPD Chief William Scott has been asking for replacements to the mass exodus of SFPD officers. If crime is not increasing in the face of reduced staffing, it weakens the impact of the chief’s appeal.
Using the base effect to manipulate the crime narrative:
In the parlance of data science, choosing the year that best suits one’s narrative is defined as using “the base effect.” Progressives, Boudin, and the Chronicle have been stating that SF crime has not increased by comparing 2021’s crime statistics--not to the most recent year of 2020--but by leapfrogging back to 2019.
San Francisco is suffering from a political crisis, not an economic one. We are not recovering from Covid like the rest of country. Per the Wall Street Journal, national airport check-ins and national Open Table restaurant bookings are 90% of prepandemic levels. Meanwhile in San Francisco:
· For the week of March 23rd through the 30th, SF had the lowest office occupancy rate in the country.
· Three weeks ago, EMC Research released a poll on the obvious: people are reluctant to visit downtown SF for fear of crime.
· A Stanford study, once again, San Francisco leads the country in the highest worker resistance to returning back to the office.
· In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, San Francisco was #2 to only New York City for the greatest percentage loss in population.
· As a barometer of waning interest in SF residency, the Wall Street Journal reported that only Minneapolis’ and San Francisco’s rent pricing has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Yet in this deteriorating environment, the Chronicle’s Phil Ting and Susie Neilson deny these obvious facts when they propagandize that crime has declined by comparing total crime from the economically healthy 2019 San Francisco to the ghost town we now live in. Two weeks ago, Susie Neilson was still putting forth that fewer than 10 shoplifts occur daily within the entire 49 square miles of San Francisco.
Skip the numbers for a second, and ask yourself:
· Does the daytime quantity of people at California and Montgomery or Powell and Market Streets resemble anything like 2019?
· And accordingly, did San Francisco residents’ lifestyle in the Covid-lockdown mode of 2021 resemble more closely:
a) Covid-lockdown 2020, or
b) pre-Covid in 2019?
If you believe the atmosphere in the 2020 version of San Francisco changed drastically from 2019, then you can see how progressives, the Chronicle, and Boudin are misleading the residents about increased crime by using the base effect.
SFPD’s double recordkeeping promotes the progressives’ narrative
When I write an article involving statistics, readers immediately chime: stats lie. However, there is a difference between misinterpreting stats using the base effect and producing inaccurate statistics like SFPD does. If this section appears complex, just skip to the inserted SFPD crime exhibits below and ask yourself: Doesn’t it appear that SFPD is keeping two sets of books?
SFPD’S most accurate statistics are filed under Compstat, which eventually are used as the basis of the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR). These stats are almost exclusively produced by civilian employees of SFPD, who have no training or education in data science. To say these numbers are a mess, is an understatement.
For example:
Per SFPD’s Compstat, rapes in 2021 declined 9% from 2020, but per SFPD’s Compstat, rapes in 2021 increased 2% from 2020.
Per SFPD’s Compstat, car thefts declined 1% in 2021, but per SFPD’s Compstat, car thefts increased 1% in 2021.
In general, here is how the 2020 and 2021 SFPD Compstats are presented:
Exhibit One
(2021 crime totals appear on the right, under 2020’s totals.)
Crime stats from 2020 are used for a comparative basis to compare back to 2019, and forward to 2021. Yet the 2020 crime stats are completely different when used to compare to 2019 and then to 2021. How can 2020 crimes change for the same year after the books are closed?
Below are both of the two differently reported 2020 SFPD crime totals juxtaposed. Column A represents 2020 crime totals when they were compared to 2019. Column B represents the same 2020 crime totals when they were compared to 2021.
Exhibit Two
Again, crime stats for 2020 have different totals. Why?
After 2020 closed, SFPD reported there were 202 rapes for that year. After 2021 closed, SFPD then reported there were 224 rapes back in 2020, which made it appear that rapes in 2021 had declined. Had SFPD used the 202 initial total for 2020 and compared it to the initial 2021 rape total of 204, it would have instead increased year-over-year. This raises two questions:
· The footnotes to this SFPD report said that “rapes are counted when (in the year) they are reported” -- not when they occur. Then how did twenty-two 2020 rapes that were reported in 2021 somehow get posted back to 2020?
· Is SFPD purposely delaying adding crimes until after the yearly crime books are closed to massage the numbers?
So, what SFPD is doing each year is publishing preliminary crime stats that are labeled as final numbers. The next year, SFPD looks back at those preliminary crime stats and updates them to a higher final number and compares them to the preliminary stats for the current year. The effect is an annual reduction in the margin of increased crime, which understates criminal activity. The civilian stat keepers at SFPD are essentially keeping two sets of books.
If you look at my handwritten column (below), you will see what the crime changes would have been had SFPD used the preliminary 2020 numbers (column A) compared to the preliminary 2021 numbers (column C).
Exhibit Three
When making this comparison, total crime was up 13.4%--not 11%. Violent crime was up 1.8%-- three times the .06% that SFPD is showing.
You should be asking yourself whether this lag in recording crime stats will happen again at the end of 2022? Here’s a clue: Look at how December 2021 was presented on two different SFPD reports:
Exhibit Four
In the 2021 final Compstat statistics (above), for the month of December 2021 there were was 4,162 total crimes. But, when January 2022 monthly total was compared to the prior month of December 2021, SFPD’s Compstat now shows 4,516 total crimes. Consider how nonsensical this sounds: SFPD is reporting that December 2021 crimes increased 8.5% in the month of January 2022.
Chronicle’s Susie Nielson’s misinformation campaign to mask increased crime trends
Yesterday (April 18), Nielson posted on Twitter:
Now, look at Exhibit Three above and you can see where reported car break-ins “actually” increased 41% during the pandemic years of 2020 through 2021. Absent this being a typographical error, there are no pleasant words to describe Susie’s apparent intentional falsification of data.
This double-recordkeeping is only semi-intentional
In the real world, some crime victims don’t get around to reporting a car break-in, or their home being burglarized until a couple weeks after the crime—and that is after SFPD has closed the record books. Thus, it doesn’t mean SFPD is intentionally trying to mislead the public. However, using incomplete final numbers conveniently makes Chief Scott’s policies look more successful.
The proper accounting for these straggling crimes numbers would be to restate the prior year’s crime stats for both the sake of accuracy and for the appearance of professionalism. But that is not being done. As s CPA, this material misstatement of crime totals raises the question of whether there are other inaccuracies in SFPD’s numbers?
Like many of you, I am frustrated with the Chronicle’s and Boudin’s efforts to spin ridiculous stats to prove that crime is down: We found that incidents of domestic violence committed by redheaded left handers declined in odd-numbered zip codes for 2021. It’s time for Chief Scott, an accountant by education, to bring clarity and integrity to SFPD’s crime statistics. The voters, residents, commuters, shoppers, and tourists need to know what they, and the SFPD officers, are really up against.
The only inaccuracies are the Clowns running this "S--t Show"! The "Sheeps" are not interested in demanding an honest account of crime Stat's. Nothing changes until election's, and by then the damage is too great to repair??
Chron is a diminishing product; the editors have instilled a slanted myopic vision. Keep battling Lou