A Quick Service Post before we get invaded
Are the Feds coming to SF?
Well, it’s starting to look like it’s happening. Washington Republicans have been making noise about sending the National Guard to a city they’ve long hated. But, then again, the list of cities they hated was long. But this week, SF has come in for the Eye of Sauron-treatment. Marc Benioff—CEO of Salesforce, and noted resident of the Big Island of Hawai’i—decided to make nice with Donald Trump by using an interview in The New York Times to call for the National Guard to be deployed in San Francisco. And the President, in the sort of rambling pack of lies we are now asked to call “speech” seemed inclined to follow that recommendation. All in the name of “cleaning up” San Francisco’s “mess”.
Like politicians in other cities targeted by the President, Mayor Daniel Lurie has begged the administration not to do this. Our State Senator has been more blunt, saying SF “neither needs nor wants Trump’s personal army on our streets”. But what do they know, they’re just our elected representatives. The President would later claim that “government officials” had “requested” a National Guard presence in San Francisco. “I think we can make San Francisco—one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess,” Trump noted.
So just to be clear: it sure seems like the “government official” from San Francisco who requested the people who brought you the invasion of Granada should patrol in front of the Nintendo Store in Union Square is Marc Benioff. A billionaire who lives in Hawai’i. And who has been elected to exactly nothing in SF, though he did build us a train station with no trains in it, so I guess thanks for that. More importantly: to the Trump administration, it seems, “government officials” by now just means your friendly local neighborhood billionaire. It sure feels like we’re operating by some kind of liege lord logic here.
People absolutely love having opinions about San Francisco—something Moira Donegan and I did an entire episode of In Bed with the Right about. They parachute in and film some trash, an unhoused person or a syringe, and get out again. The actual problems the city has—the affordability crisis, for one—not only doesn’t seem to matter to them. The real problems to them don’t seem quite real. Because we who live here are not quite real. We’re props to be played with.
Especially the titans of the tech industry seem to have more opinions about us the less they actually live here. How many profiles have we had of tech billionaires “leaving” San Francisco—written by credulous reporters who never ask the obvious thing of how a person with 20 houses and a good chunk of an island can possibly claim to be “leaving” a place. Or why the opinions on the subject of street violence and cleanliness of a man who hasn’t set foot in a Safeway in 15 years should matter, and why his feeling of safety should be worth anyone’s time.
But that’s the thing: long before Trump’s crusade against cities that didn’t vote for him, descriptions of San Francisco tended to get traction the less time the person providing them had spent there recently. Which is why it’s not an accident that it’s a tech billionaire who decided to sacrifice his former city as a cheap sales pitch. Because complaining about San Francisco allows billionaires to pretend to still be locals.
When Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App, was stabbed to death in San Francisco in April 2023, tech executives competed on Twitter and in the media to lament the decline of the city. A city, we might add, which most of them had officially turned their backs on long ago. Venture investor David Sacks speculated on his podcast that he was betting the perpetrator was “a psychotic homeless man.” Elon Musk sounded off on X about “violent repeat offenders.” When San Francisco police warned against jumping to conclusions, angel investor Jason Calcanis lost his temper: “EVIL INCOMPETENT FOOLS & GRIFTERS WHO ACCOMPLISH NOTHING EXCEPT ENABLING RAMPANT VIOLENCE,” he wrote on Twitter. (It’s worth reading the sheer outpouring of founder hate in the wake of Lee’s killing—Scott Alan Lucas has a fantastic rundown in his recent book about the murder, Last Night in San Francisco.
In the end, it turned out that Bob Lee was the victim of another tech entrepreneur he knew personally. A relationship crime involving drugs, ambition, and elite parties. What was interesting, however, wasn’t just how instinctively the city’s richest people identified the culprit among the city’s poorest; how readily they identified people like themselves as victims, and people who, by any logic, were actually their victims, as perpetrators. What was especially interesting was how quickly Sacks, Musk, and Calcanis reintegrated when it came to disparaging “their” city, after having gone to great lengths to separate from it. (Although admittedly Calcanis didn’t officially leave San Francisco until 2024.)
So I thought it might make sense to give readers a sense of what SF is like right now. I was inspired partly by having had to walk a lot in downtown recently—long story, but basically my car broke down two weeks ago. And while I have always walked and biked around a lot around in SF, I hadn’t spent much time downtown—the place where out-of-town journalists, conservative influencers and conservative politicians tend to land when they want to observe some stuff they can then breathlessly report.
And I was struck by how quietly busy everything was. People were on their way to work, traffic was a nightmare. But the two Muni trains I took were on time, the stations were clean and full of people. You wouldn’t know it from the doom loop coverage, but SF opened a new underground trolley line during the pandemic. Which I took down to 4th and King to jump on one of Caltrain’s new electrified trains down to Palo Alto. Not a single piece of infrastructure I set foot on that morning was older than 2020. Not many cities can say that for themselves. But sorry, you were saying something about the “zombie apocalypse”?
“But Adrian, you can’t just pick a bunch of anecdotes!” Sure I can, that’s all Elon Musk, Marc Benioff and their ilk are doing, after all! If you walk around San Francisco, a city of immense socio-economic differences, looking for visible poverty, believe me, you will find it! But talk about “hell hole”, “zombie apocalypse”, etc. isn’t about socio-economic differences. Musk et al are not offended on behalf of the poor. They’re offended at having to see the poor. The victims these men imagine are, as the Bob Lee fiasco made clear, … these men themselves.
And because poverty in San Francisco is disproportionately concentrated in SoMa and the Tenderloin, i.e. areas that immediately abut downtown, visibility is really all these “SF hellscape” stories can rely on. Because while the statistics on homelessness in SF are indeed grim, the statistics on crime bear—to put it mildly—no relationship to the story people like the President like to tell about the city. So since we might get boots on the ground in SF based on our supposed lawlessness, let’s have a look at that lawlessness. The Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) compile statistics for the most populous cities in America, provided that those cities have reported data to the FBI UCR system.
For the year 2024, the UCR lists 596.50 “violent crimes” per 100,000 residents in SF. That’s not nothing, but it’s worth noting that that’s lower than Denver (993.03), Charlotte, NC (733.21), Oklahoma City (676.01) and all major metro areas in Ohio on the UCR list save Columbus. You may notice that none of these cities have come up as possible candidates for invasion, which is just so weird!
San Francisco’s murder rate in 2024 was 4.36, about an 8th of the rate in Detroit. It is in fact on par with some European capitals, such as Berlin, Germany (4.7), though different methodologies make those kinds of comparisons difficult. If you’ve clicked through the UCR database, you’ll notice that two Florida Cities—Jacksonville and Orlando—don’t show up in the table because the cities simply didn’t report their stats to the UCR. Florida is of course run by a governor who loves to stand on street corners in SF to pontificate about “failed” liberal cities.
San Francisco’s crime spike during the COVID years has attracted outsized attention, but it’s worth pointing out that it has proved exceedingly short-lived. The overall trendline when it comes to crime is down. The murder rate—usually considered the best benchmark for measuring “crime”, since a dead body is less open to interpretation than many other crimes—has declined 45% from the 2019 (i.e. pre-COVID) number. During that same time, Oklahoma City saw an increase of 45%, Fort Worth saw an increase of 30%, and Austin, i.e. the place every tech founder seems to abscond to while whining about SF’s rampant crime problem, saw its homicide rate jump by 115%. This year, San Francisco’s homicide rate is on track to be the lowest since the 1950s.
As for those projections: according to the SFPD’s own crime dashboard, when you compare the numbers for 2025 to the number the same crime had hit by the date of this writing in 2024, those numbers are lower across the board. In the chart below, the golden bars represent the number of incidents of each crime from 01/01/25 to 10/12/2025. The blue bar represents the number of incidents for the same date range in 2024. Not only is crime at an all-time low; it looks to be decreasing in 2025 in literally every single metric. Yes, even theft, even car theft, even burglary.
As the State of California notes in an appropriately snippy press release, in 2024 California’s homicide rate was “the second lowest it has been since at least 1966.” According to CDC data from 2022, the state doesn’t even come close to cracking the top tier for homicide rates in the country. That honor would belong to Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas. Mysteriously, no National Guards deployments appear to be planned in any of those places. Nor do I imagine that big national newspapers will do long features about their violence problems. To be fair, who could find the time, when there are life-and-death issues like shoplifting in SF to be reported on?
While I could not find a complete list of the 30 or so homicides in San Francisco during 2024, a search of LexisNexis and the San Francisco Chronicle’s archive gives a pretty good idea of what these crimes looked like. And to be clear, the kind of thing Republicans seem to be imagining—a homeless person in the throes of substance abuse or a mental health crisis attacking a random passerby—does exist in San Francisco. There was the case of a woman being pushed in front of a BART train by a man described as a “transient” in July 2024. There were shootings that news reporting at the time suggested had to do with narcotics. But each of these appear to have been in the low single digits.
The overview is necessarily partial, but it is clear from the data that what violence problem exists in San Francisco bears little relationship to the problems conservatives seem to want to attack. There’s the stabbing at the BART station in mid-November, which prosecutors decided not to charge, suggesting that it might have been in self-defense. As far as I can tell, the most prolific killer in 2024 in San Francisco is Mary Fong Lau, who drove her car at 80 mph on the wrong side of the street into a bus stop, killing an entire family of four. I am not sure whether her four victims were “investigated as homicides” and would thus be part of the 35. But, if so, it really looks like Mary Fong Lau’s Mercedes SUV killed as many San Franciscans as “the homeless” as a whole category did in 2024.
But of course Lau’s case is being reported entirely differently. I’ll briefly note that Lexis Nexis gives me about 1300 hits for “San Francisco” and “Homicide” (and over 15,000 for “San Francisco” and “Crime”) for 2024. That means mentions of SF homicides exceeded the actual incidence of the crime by a factor of about 37. And for every theft in San Francisco there was a newspaper report talking about it. Them’s Taylor Swift numbers, folks!
Let me return to something that Trump said in his remarks in the White House: “I think we can make San Francisco -- one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess.” What exactly makes it “a mess”. 15 years ago it was one of our great cities—and its homicide rate stood at 98 (in 2007). Now it’s projected to hit about one quarter of that number, and suddenly it’s “a mess”. Look again at the crime dashboard above—what’s our mess exactly? Not assaults, not arson, not burglary. What is it?
I think, as always, it helps to take Trump’s ramblings literally. When he says “mess”, he means “mess”. As, I think, does Marc Benioff, though he’s too smart to say so outright. When Trump first mentioned SF as one of the cities he wanted to militarize back in August, his exact words were: “Look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco. They’ve destroyed it. We could clean that up, too. We’ll clean that one up, too.” His revulsion, Marc Benioff’s revulsion, is aesthetic. It’s not about violence, it’s not about corruption. After all, Violence and Corruption are the President’s first and middle names.
Much more likely, these are men who would militarize a US city because they saw poop on the ground. Because there was a person living in a tent as they were being guided to their limo. “Cleaning up” is about the types of things they have to see here, or whichever right wing billionaire has their ear this week. So what are Musk, Thiel, Benioff, Ellison grossed out by today? Let’s send in men in armored vehicles to police them. I’m guessing it’s the unhoused and the visibly poor. I’m guessing it’s San Franciscans who are mentally ill. But I’m also guessing queer people, drag queens, Black people. As people have been pointing out while Trump has sent military units to LA, to DC and attempted to send them to Portland and Chicago: there are constitutional reasons why you don’t have the army take on policing; and there are pragmatic ones. They’re not trained to fight crime. And they’re not trained to deescalate — so you’re far more likely to see violence spike in this city than have it go down further once the men in fatigues show up.
Which is of course the entire point. Because another reason they’re picking on us is because we won’t take their shit. There will be protests here and there will be unkind words hurled. And right wing influencers can fly in and make their demented Insta reels. Which Chaya Raichik can then use to doxx everyday people. Which Elon Musk can use to get people fired. Which Bari Weiss can use on her new and de-wokified CBS news. Which Bari’s wife (another scion of billion dollar fortune, by the by) can use in her I-hate-SF-columns. It’s a snake eating its own tail and it would be darkly funny—disgusting, but funny—, if there weren’t men with machine guns coming to my street.
There’s a good chance I get to take my child past men with machine guns in a few weeks’ time because one checked-out billionaire wanted to curry favor with another checked-out billionaire. I’ll point out that the guns she will see on those soldiers (because let’s be clear, National Guardsmen are soldiers) will be the first guns she sees in her life, in her city of San Francisco. And at the end of the day, I’m simply furious about that. So if you work in media and you’ve invoked the word “war zone” to describe my city in the last few years, take a victory lap: depending on what the next few weeks bring, you may have helped, in however small a measure, to turn it into one. You fucking disgrace.