Subject: Re: We're Never Voting' For Him Again
I was thinking of total crime there. Another framework of the Goofster's that I reject (other than his other batch of goalpost moving) is restricting things to just murder.

Also nope. You can look at a broad variety of crimes here, but they're all generally down in 2023 - and much lower than in the past. If Seattle is setting multi-decade highs in total crime as well as murder, that's not something they have in San Francisco (or New York, which also experienced broad drops in crime):

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/p...

The reason that Goofy tends to cite murder stats is as a rebuttal against the inevitable rebuttals of either unreported/underreported crimes or "quality of life" crimes. Unlike nearly all other crimes, murders are so serious and difficult to completely conceal that they're almost always reported, so they're usually the most reliable dataset for comparing crime levels across different geographies - and since there's a strong correlation between murder rates and other crime rates, they're a good proxy for overall levels of "total crime." Not perfect, of course. But if you're looking at a city that has a lower murder rate than previously, it is not newly an urban hellhole if it wasn't back then. And since nearly every city has lower murder rates than before the near-term dips (right before and into the pandemic), it's unlikely that many of our major cities are now "urban hellholes" in a way they haven't historically been.

Except, again, perhaps Seattle. Which for some reason different than most other liberal cities is experiencing multi-decadal highs in crime, including murder.