Anecdotally whenever I hear a SF resident say the "crime problem is overblown", they almost always live in the nicer areas where there's virtually no crime. I lived on the border of the Tenderloin years ago, and saw things that I've never seen anywhere else. I knew a guy who was murdered in the Polk Gulch, I had my car broken into (and rummaged through multiple times after I started leaving the door unlocked), I had to physically assert myself with my friend to not seem like a target when a man brandishing a metal rod was eyeing us suspiciously, I stepped on a used hyperdermic needle which pierced my shoe but luckily did not prick me ... this is only what comes to mind at the moment as a write this, but I'm sure there's more incidents I experienced that I could conjure after some reflection. Is my experience anecdotal? Sure, but I lived it. Your experience with the city has likely been a much better one, free from such disturbing experiences. Does that mean I didn't experience this though? Or that it is "overblown"?
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.
Yes I believe all these things, but that would be true in any other big city in the US. Try living in the bad areas of Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, or Cleaveland. When San Francisco has article after article saying crime is "out of control" yet no one is writing articles about Alabama or Louisiana which objectively have higher murder rates, I would say, yes it is "overblown".
I think the question is: where did you move in New York? When you were in SF, you chose to live in/near the worst neighborhood in the city. I assume when you moved to NY, you moved somewhere a bit nicer? Do you truly believe NY has no "bad areas" that you should avoid?
This doesn't excuse the crime in the Tenderloin, but when people talk about the SF crime problem being overblown, they mean to say that there is an expected level of crime in most cities, and SF's level of crime is no worse than many others, despite what some people would like to believe.
That doesn't mean the crime in the Tenderloin is ok! But it's important to put things in context, and decide if SF is doing better or worse than other comparable cities in dealing with crime. Stats seem to point to the idea that SF is doing ok in that regard. That doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't do better, but it does mean that the sky is not falling, and there's no reason for extreme panic over SF's crime rate.
Anecdotally whenever I hear a SF resident say the "crime problem is overblown", they almost always live in the nicer areas where there's virtually no crime.
As someone who has lived in moderate-to-high crime areas for more of my life than not, most people who express a fear of crime are even less willing to listen to data-informed analyses supplemented with first hand experience, often behaving as if they're worried it might be contagious.
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.
It seems like it might be instructive to compare your current happiness with the rhetoric of Marjorie Taylor Greene who visited recently to show support for Donal Trump and followed up with an online tirade about how 'repulsive' she found NYC.
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.