Comments by "JI80" (@ji8044) on "Thomas Sowell On How The War Against Police Harms Black Americans & Their Businesses" video.

The number of police in any given area has very little to do with the amount of crime. The availability of jobs and economic growth are the leading indicators of criminal activity.
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Difficult to understand problematic interactions with police, when you have spent most of your adult life working on college campuses like Sowell. As you say there are bad citizens and bad cops.
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@carlpolen7437 Sowell never presents data. He presents anecdotal information. For instance you mentioned the first two minutes. Almost none of that video is from San Francisco, the city discussed. On one police car you can see "Santa Monica" which is a suburb of Los Angeles and 400 miles away from San Francisco. So it's simply an emotional appeal, having little factual basis.
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@timothytakang5407 San Francisco, like many big cities globally, has been hit hard by the pandemic. Any stats involving the last three years would have no comparative validity because office space has emptied out in all cities. When that happened, all the businesses which depended on those workers suffered and closed too. I would bring up one point on which SF is wrong though. You have to eliminate the open air drug mixed with the homeless in all cities. Nobody has figured out an effective way to do that yet though.
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@carlpolen7437 No he really isn't well regarded outside the extreme right wing of conservatism, but you wouldn't know that because most likely you are one.
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@timothytakang5407 There has been an increase in violent crimes in the last two years, but it's much safer than most cities of a similar size: "San Francisco recorded 56 homicides each in 2022 and 2021, up over 36% from 2019, when there were 41 homicides, according to police department data. Despite the increase, the number of homicides in San Francisco is well below that of other cities of a similar size, data from the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association shows. Indianapolis, for example, witnessed 271 homicides in 2021 and 226 in 2022. Jacksonville, Florida, meanwhile, saw 129 homicides in 2021 and 154 in 2022, while 204 homicides took place in Columbus, Ohio, in 2021 and 140 in 2022. Violent crimes in San Francisco, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, reached a high in 2013 with 7,164 violent crimes, according to California Department of Justice data. But they have tapered off significantly in the past couple of years. San Francisco now falls in the lower middle of the pack when compared with several cities of a similar population, according to data from the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association."
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