Bob Lee’s death fuels familiar complaints about big city crime

Much remains unknown about the killing of Bob Lee, the 43-year-old MobileCoin executive and Cash App founder who was found fatally stabbed in San Francisco’s downtown Rincon Hill neighborhood early Tuesday morning. 

The San Francisco Standard said it had reviewed surveillance footage that showed Lee calling 911 and pleading for help from someone in a parked car, who drove off leaving the tech founder collapsed on the street. Police haven’t made arrests or named a suspect, and said the investigation “is still in the early stages.”

Tech industry members immediately expressed their shock and grief over Lee’s death, including MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldbard, who tweeted that Lee “was like a brother to me.” 

But some prominent voices in the local tech scene also seized the opportunity to slam San Francisco as a violent hellscape.

“Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately,” tweeted Elon Musk. He tagged the city’s district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, in his tweet and continued: “Is the city taking stronger action to incarcerate repeat violent offenders?”

Musk wasn’t the only one to voice frustrations. Zach Coelius, a managing partner at venture capital firm Coelius Capital, told the Standard that Lee’s killing was “infuriating” and a consequence of “the city’s refusal to do its job and enforce laws.”

Vik Kashyap, a healthcare startup CEO living near where Lee was killed, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Why don’t we enforce the law? Why are there no consequences? Why is there an atmosphere of lawlessness?” 

These narratives were quickly echoed by conservative commentators, who for years have sought to paint San Francisco as a cautionary tale against progressive reforms. 

“Incidents like this are predictable and inevitable when violent crime is not deterred, even encouraged,” tweeted Marina Medvin, a right-wing defense lawyer who represents some of the January 6 rioters. InfoWars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson wrote that the tragedy highlighted San Francisco’s “violent criminality.” Ed Henry, a host on the far-right channel Real America’s Voice noted that Lee had been stabbed in Nancy Pelosi’s district, before declaring, “This is what’s happening in America right now.”

But statistics show that violent crimes are actually rare in San Francisco compared to other major American cities, and murders in San Francisco even rarer. 

 

According to FBI data compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco police reported 544 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2020—the most recent year for which nationwide data is available. And San Francisco saw just 5 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020. 

By contrast, Miami—where Bob Lee had moved late last year—has a murder rate that nearly doubles San Francisco’s. And homicides in cities like Dallas and Houston are nearly three times higher. 

Nonetheless, property crimes in San Francisco are among the highest in the country, with a post-pandemic wave of car break-ins that hasn’t abated. That, coupled with persistently high rates of unsheltered homelessness in the city, has stoked fury among a contingent of residents who blame urban disorder on criminal justice reforms.

Last July, an alliance of tech industry leaders and billionaire GOP funders pulled off a successful campaign to recall San Francisco’s progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin, who had sought to crack down on police misconduct, decriminalize poverty and homelessness, and promote alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent crimes. 

Asked to respond to Musk’s tweet by an NBC news anchor on Thursday, Boudin’s replacement, district attorney Jenkins, said: “Absolutely, we are taking a stronger approach to making sure that those who present a safety risk on our streets, that we are asking judges to keep them in custody.”

Supporters of criminal justice reform fear that’s a sign that the city could be caving to fearmongering. That includes Mohamed Shehk, an organizer with the anti-imprisonment group Critical Resistance, who led a successful movement to shut down a notorious San Francisco jail in 2020. Despite the city’s progressive reputation, the rise of tech wealth has caused a “marked shift in the rhetoric to one that pushes and advocates for the criminalization of people, for people to be displaced, for people to be thrown away in cages,” he tells Fast Company. 

But “these calls for more imprisonment, coming from the likes of Elon Musk, are actually calls for more of the system of racist control and exclusion of communities that are most marginalized,” Shehk says. To create a truly safe San Francisco, “we really need to address, structurally, what sits at the foundation, which is deep investment in things like housing, healthcare, education, meaningful employment—the basic necessities that communities need to not just survive, but thrive.”