SF tech executive’s killing prompts second guessing about crime and progressive DAs
The arrest of a suspect in the killing of a tech executive in San Francisco earlier this month that made national headlines was first reported by a Mission Local, a small independent outlet.
It had been more than a week since Bob Lee, the 43-year-old who founded the Cash app, was fatally stabbed in downtown San Francisco on a deserted sidewalk in the early morning hours of April 4. By then it was already a foregone conclusion that his killing was associated with the perception of a national crime wave in big cities with progressive prosecutors.
Except it wasn’t. Lee was killed by Nima Momeni, a tech entrepreneur, over a dispute involving his Momeni’s sister, according to police.
“This scenario would explain, in part, why Lee was walking through a portion of Main Street in which there is little to no foot traffic at 2:30 a.m. That was one of several incongruous circumstances surrounding Lee’s violent death, which law-enforcement sources, from the get-go felt made it far from a straightforward or random crime,” Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi reports.
"Nevertheless, some of Lee’s fellow tech luminaries and a chorus of other influential voices portrayed this killing as part and parcel of a city awash in violent crime and on a descent into further chaos. While Lee is one of a dozen homicide victims in San Francisco this year, his is the only killing that has garnered national coverage — or, in most cases, even cursory local coverage."
The circumstances surrounding Lee’s killing may not have fit the narrative that progressive prosecutors are responsible for rising crime. But the case nevertheless underscores what The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang describes as “two seemingly conflicting truths” about progressive prosecutors.
“The first: a whole lot of people—especially the press and the police—blame their lenient bail and sentencing practices for every murder, robbery, and homeless encampment,” Kang writes.
“The second: despite mostly bad press, public outcry, and the accusation from the right that they are pawns of George Soros, who has sent them to single-handedly turn America’s great cities into wastelands, they keep getting elected.”
The circumstances surrounding Lee’s killing, in fact, more closely resembles the reality that most violent crime involves people who know each other, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik writes.
“The problem is worse than simply the mischaracterization of a single high-profile crime,” Hiltzik asserts.
“It’s part of a long-term phenomenon in which the public’s fear of random violence has been fed by law enforcement advocates to burnish the image of police as the only bulwark against a perilously unpredictable world.”
The perceptions of pervasive crime have led to, among other things, the militarization of police, and such perceptions won't necessarily change even if they don't square with reality.
"The killing of Bob Lee is that rare case in which the prevailing narrative was flatly and swiftly contradicted by subsequent events. But it’s unlikely that it will eradicate the impression that San Francisco has descended into chaos," Hiltzik writes.
"The impression is too often repeated and too colorful. From the standpoint of public health and safety, that’s too bad."
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