‘Mostly Peaceful Homicide’: CNN Draws Backlash For Downplaying San Francisco Crime After Tech Founder’s Stabbing

CNN drew backlash over an article claiming that worries over the recent murder of Bob Lee, a prominent technology entrepreneur and founder of CashApp, in the city of San Francisco do not account for the fact that other cities have worse crime rates.

Lee, the 43-year-old main product commander of the cryptocurrency startup MobileCoin at the time of his death, was in downtown San Francisco when he was stabbed early on Tuesday morning. He is survived by two younger girls, and when employees learned of his passing, they were saddened.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and former UFC champion Jake Shields were among the well-known people who criticized San Francisco’s’s leader for the death of Lee.

San Francisco has” violent crime rates that are well below that of most other buildings of a comparable size ,” according to CNN’s’s post from Friday.

According to the story, San Francisco next ranks lower than other cities with a comparable people. It also mentions that homicide rates are higher in cities like Jacksonville, Columbus, and Indianapolis. San Francisco’s’s arrest rate has dropped by 29 %, while violent crime has decreased by 14 % between 2019 and 2022.

According to George Tita, a professor of criminal justice at the University of California Irvine, Lee’s’s death was given undue attention due to his notoriety as an entrepreneur in technology. Tita argued that when a well-known technology figure is killed, it will simply garner more attention than if they were an underprivileged person living in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. It’s’s just fruit that hangs low. Nobody is interested in looking at specific data. Red states have higher crime rates than blue state, with red states having the highest levels of crime data.

Conservative critics claimed it was absurd to dismiss the city’s’s violent crime by claiming that some cities are even less secure. Even though violent crime is declining, some property crimes, like vehicle thefts, have skyrocketed.

Gabriella Hoffman, a Townhall source, said,” I was in SF back in February and saw signs in prevalent areas warning of having my van burglarized if I left things within.” ” My best college friend, a lifelong resident of San Francisco, just actually uses derogatory language to describe his place.” Sorry, but that isn’t the sign of a safer place. Sad what has become of this once-beautiful place.

Older author Mark Hemingway of RealClearInvestigations added,” It seems to me that where and how violent crime occurs matters a lot.” ” Jacksonville may have more murders per capita, but as a random law-abiding citizen, there’s’s no doubt you feel much less secure spending an afternoon in downtown San Francisco.”

Another social media user remarked that CNN, which became well-known for a news chyron three years ago that referred to the Black Lives Matter riot in Wisconsin as” fiery but mostly peaceful ,” thought Lee’s’s death was” mostly peaceful homicide.”

Other commenters on social media recalled that Kyung Lah, a senior national correspondent for CNN, had lately been the target of assault outside San Francisco City Hall. Despite the fact that the rental car was secured by personal security, thieves broke the window while they were reporting on widespread street crime and stole several bags.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases