American psychos

The world’s largest open-air mental asylum

As we finished our burgers in a small park by the bay, we headed up the path to the road. In front of us, almost blocking our way, a man stood with his arms outstretched, staring at us intensely. As we walked past, avoiding eye contact, he muttered in a gravelly voice: ‘that’s why I had to kill him’.

The three of us - me, a friend and his colleague - had 14 minutes to wait for a cab, and rather alarmingly, the man began to follow us. We walked into a bar on the corner, where he stood outside, gazing intently. He then passed out of view before coming back, clearly looking for us. I suggested that perhaps it would be worth calling the police, as there was a crazy person wandering around muttering about murder, but my friend’s colleague, who knows San Francisco well, replied that they would simply laugh at us. This was such a frequent occurrence, after all.

The Waymo arrived and, keeping an eye on the madman who was now standing across the road in an agitated state, we got into our robot-taxi rescuer. Someone mentioned recently that I use the word ‘dystopian’ a lot, but how else to describe San Francisco? Later that night, after that somewhat unnerving experience, I noted that the city mayor had tweeted a survey showing it to be one of the safest cities on earth, only a few places lower than Tokyo. Sure.

San Francisco’s murder rate is indeed quite low by American standards, although about five or six times that of London or Paris (and about 30 times worse than Tokyo), and it is far more afflicted by quality-of-life crimes, shoplifting in particular, rather than serious violence. But its homelessness problem is indeed as bad as everyone says, and apparently it’s got a lot better since its nadir in the early 2020s.

This was by no means the only example of public psychosis I saw in the city last week. On Sansome Street, a woman was screaming at the top of her voice: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? over and over, a blood-curdling shriek interspersed with sobbing. There are dead-eyed and dead-looking homeless everywhere, and evidence of drug addiction all around; at a bus stop in the Financial District I saw a man lying inside a bag, a sort of human-sized bong. You don’t see that in Japan.

San Francisco is notorious, but not alone; of the cities I’ve visited here, including Washington, Charlottesville and New York, only Charleston seems to lack its own army of zombies. Before travelling to San Francisco, I visited Austin, where every tech person seemed to have fled the Bay Area because of the squalor; someone described their own personal moment when, out having supper, he was treated to the view of a woman defecating in full view of diners.