I have something to say on the "crime is up" or "crime is down" thing. First, I've noticed it's a subject - much like gun violence, where one can pick and choose your statistics to fit your narrative. There are dozens of metrics (half of which there is no way to even measure at all!) that can be flipped On or Off when measuring - I won't go into them now but I assume you can think of them (accident vs. crime, death vs. injury, good guy injured vs. bad guy injured, etc etc etc).
I think "crime is up/down" is very much like this. I will say that people's anecdotal feelings matter, because there is an aspect of crime that has everything to do with which crimes we care more or less about. For example, imagine an extreme world where 100% of all crime was "inside" an enclosed area where ONLY bad guys were, who had opted-in to the life of violence. And it never impacted anyone outside that world. We would care at least to some degree less than we care currently, right? Presumably this is a non-controversial statement.
Now, take that same analogy but apply it in modest DEGREES to the current situation. If most of the crime is in a really bad part of town that I never go in, I care about crime a certain amount (non-quantifiable, so this is a bit in the abstract, but follow me here). If 100% of crime is the opposite, I care to the maximum about it.
Some cities are experiencing crime that is more 'brazen', or more crime that is brazen, than ever before. This is my opinion. It's not really quantifiable, because everyone will have different opinions about it, but when you have Targets (usually in decent blocks of town) with smash 'n grabs, or Walgreens that have had to close down, that's significant. Downtowns are usually a certain amount of crime - when the areas where people live, work and play that have NOT been already-notorious for crime begin to experience brazen violent crime, when it affects tourism to a great degree, that's all significant - and it plays into whether people say crime is 'worse' or 'better'.
And it should, it's legitimate distinctions people are making. Therefore I won't get into the statistics-battle, because you can find stats to show Chicago is on the mend; I can find stats to show it's worse than ever, depending on a dozen small differences in the sources and most importantly the ways of measuring of those stats. So much so that I feel it's not even worth arguing about. But if most of the city says crime is a lot worse, there's a reason. And I doubt it's because San Franciscans are all watching Fox News.