> The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes.

The Bay Area includes San Jose (25 murders a year), Oakland (normally 110 murders a year), San Francisco (50 murders a year), and dozens of other cities which are mostly more peaceful but contribute several dozen more murders a year to the total. So it has roughly one murder every day. There's a nice historical overview of the statistics at https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-increase..., explaining that Oakland's murder rate has gone up 45% in 02021. The Merc has a great homicide map at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/06/bay-area-homicides-20...

A murder a day is plenty for the local news most of the time. So it's hardly surprising that a drive-by shooting that failed to actually shoot anybody wouldn't make the news, because things like that happen every day, and have been for thirty or forty years. This is not, in itself, a symptom of anything unusual in the SFBA this year.

(Of course, there are many unusual things in the SFBA this year, since it's the second year of the pandemic, but a crime wave doesn't seem to be one of them, except in Oakland.)

scrollbar points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503928 that in fact Oakland increased their police budget this year by US$39 million. So, if we're supposed to infer a causal relation from police defunding to homicide rates from these data, it would be the opposite of the one Weiss (or Leighton?) arrived at: increased police funding "caused" a huge jump in the homicide rate. This is not entirely implausible, but it seems unlikely to pan out on further investigation (for reasons Leighton mentions later in the story).

You can see from the SF Chron story I linked above that Oakland's murder rate has mostly been between 20 and 40 per 100,000 residents per year for half a century, peaking above 40 from the leaded-gasoline crime wave just after 01990. This is very much in conflict with Leighton's portrayal of Oakland as being full of "areas where crime and violence are more of an abstraction than a daily reality", as is the Merc's map. The corresponding number for the US as a whole from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... is 5.0. Oakland is more like Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa than it is like the US; its spectacular murder rate puts it in the neighborhood of the top 50 cities in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate. On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b..., it was #23 by murder rate among US cities in 02019, before the current crime wave, with a historically very low rate of 16.24 (and #3 for robbery, and #2 for motor-vehicle theft.)

I remember one afternoon, early in the current millennium, when I went to visit a friend in Oakland. I was having a hard time finding a place to park on her block. Her neighbor across the street was practicing martial arts with weapons in his yard, but he was kind enough to interrupt his practice long enough to push someone else's car along the curb a few meters, making space for mine. For me, that memory defines Oakland more than the memories of lovely afternoons on the grass at Lake Merritt.