Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, lamented the feeling of “post-apocalyptic” in San Francisco’s downtown now that businesses had left due to the high crime rate.
Musk responded to a Twitter discussion over Nordstrom closing two stores at the Westfield Mall in San Francisco early on Thursday morning. Major retailers including Nordstrom, Whole Foods, and Walgreens have left the downtown area, according to a statement from the mall’s owner, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, because of “unsafe conditions” brought on by “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.”
“So many stores shuttered in downtown SF. Feels post-apocalyptic,” Musk tweeted.
In San Francisco, where Twitter’s headquarters are located, Musk has been outspoken about crime. The software executive’s tragic death by stabbing in what was meant to be a posh and safe area, Bob Lee, prompted the billionaire to declare that San Francisco’s “violent crime” problem “is horrific.”
According to statistics, San Francisco has less homicides per 100,000 residents than other large U.S. cities, with roughly 6.9 per 100,000.
In comparison, that is fewer in St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland, Minneapolis, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, Austin, and Washington, D.C.
The data shows that while murders have increased slightly over the past four years, other violent crimes including rapes and assaults have likewise stayed largely consistent in San Francisco. On the other side, property crimes have drastically increased since 2019.
Some experts, like Charles “Cully” Stimson of the Heritage Foundation, contend that the data provided by the police do not accurately reflect the crime situation in San Francisco because many crimes go unreported because the district attorney has failed to uphold the law.
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