Ignorance is bliss and information is anxiety. Especially when the information is anecdotal. Like many major cities, San Francisco is experiencing some of its lowest crime rates ever recorded.
During this period of relative safety, especially during the pandemic, the media made Market Street look like a scene out of a science fiction movie about life after Armageddon to people who have never been to San Francisco.
Reports from local news outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle, to national stations like Fox, portrayed San Francisco as if it was a failed state rife with enough crime to make Gotham City’s most hardened locals receive a historic cortisol spike equivalent to the kind Clavicular endured at the hands of the ASU Frat Leader… If you don’t get the joke, consider yourself cooler than me.
San Franciscans first reacted by recalling Chesa Boudin, one of the most progressive District Attorneys in modern American history, and then by electing Daniel Lurie as mayor – ousting incumbent London Breed in an apparent rejection of “progressives” in exchange for more “moderate” politicians like Daniel Lurie.
For any critique you may have of mayor Lurie, you must admit that his first 100 days in office were one of the most significant honeymoon periods a modern major city mayor has ever had.
His face was everywhere, and almost everyone seemed to like him aside from a few progressive corners huddled in dark dive bars or in left leaning communities online.
But we’re on day 426, and the realities of his policies are starting to become apparent.
While there have been undeniable improvements in San Francisco’s PR and how centrist and right-leaning publications refer to the city, San Franciscans are living in a reality that the mayor’s enthusiastic social media posts rarely convey.
There are two main categories of crime: violent crime and property crime. To the mayor’s credit, property crime has continued to decrease since its pandemic peaks. However this decrease was well underway while London Breed was in office.
Lurie has touted improvements in the city’s quality of life since taking office, but the city’s homicide rate year-to-date has increased dramatically. At this time in 2025, while many of Breed’s policies were still intact, San Francisco had only suffered a single homicide; while in just over 2 months of 2026, 9 homicides had occurred in San Francisco.
2025 concluded with only 28 homicides total. The lowest per capita rate ever recorded in the city’s history. If murders continue at 2026’s rate, the number will exceed 50.
This sharp increase in homicide coincides with budget cuts to almost every city service imaginable EXCEPT the police budget, which increased right along with the homicide rate.
This isn’t surprising because study after study shows no correlation between police budgets and the crime rate, but despite the mountain of evidence, police and politicians alike use the fear of criminals without any evidence of efficacy to take ever-expanding pieces out of the city budget’s pie.
And the increase in murders isn’t the only concerning statistic; deaths of despair, primarily drug overdoses, have held steady with 621 fatalities as Lurie spends a fortune arresting drug users and abandons proven harm reduction techniques. Overdoses temporarily spiked by over 50% shortly after Lurie’s inauguration, but the mayor seemed undeterred by this development and continued down a path of austerity and increased law enforcement.
The negatives don’t end there. Since Daniel Lurie has taken office, rents in the city have risen faster than anywhere in the nation. Currently up over 13% since last year.
And eviction filings have risen right along with the rents, experiencing a 57% increase, the highest in decades.
How will this affect his popularity?
Shortly after Lurie received an unwanted endorsement from one of the Trump Administration's most disliked former officials, Kristi Noem, video surfaced of one of the mayor’s bodyguards assaulting an unhoused man as the mayor watched, only to run away after the bodyguard ended up on the losing side of the altercation.
Despite this, Daniel Lurie still enjoys a ton of favorable press, the San Francisco subreddit still seems to love Lurie, but with all of these realities converging at once, along with disgraced former Secretary of Homeland Security stating that Daniel Lurie “works well with the federal government,” and that the two “talk quite often.”
One is forced to ask, when Mayor Daniel Lurie reiterates his now locally famous catchphrase, “San Francisco is a city on the rise!” What rise is he talking about? The rise in homicides, overdoses, evictions, rental prices and the police budget? Or is he referring to something else entirely?
Is the honeymoon over?
Or will Daniel Lurie continue to get historically high approval ratings, despite the city quantifiably going in the wrong direction?
