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San Francisco has all the energy of a big city combined with quirky and quaintness of a small town. Historical pastel-hued houses sit side-by-side with new American cuisine, hubs of creative communities and tech-giants. Nature lovers, art aficionados, foodies and those looking for romance, are all easily charmed by this classic coastal city. Plan where to go with our San Francisco travel guide.
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As the city where Airbnb started, there are plenty of non-touristy neighbourhoods for you to live like a local in. Find your home away from home in local boroughs like the trendy melting pot of cuisine, cultures and colourful characters that is Mission District, the fashionable and pop-up bar filled Hayes Valley or the family-friendly and laid-backed Noe Valley.
Want to feel the sea breeze or sneak a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from your window? On the edge of the bay, you'll find the Marina District with its unmatched views, upbeat bars and boutique-lined streets.Embarcadero and North Beach are also lively waterfront neighbourhoods where you can match great views with diverse dining and entertainment options while still being in walking distance of the famed Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.
If your idea of a holiday is a luxury hotel in an upscale neighbourhood, Nob Hill boasts excellent views, world-class restaurants and exclusive bars, all in the heart of the city. Retreat with a nice glass of wine to Napa Valley or Sonoma Wine Country where many vineyards have accommodation so you won't have to worry about driving back to San Francisco after a few tastings.
Considering San Francisco is just 7x7miles, this small city has plenty of exciting things to do, and character-filled neighbourhoods packed into it. This compact design works in the favour of visitors as there is no chance you'll miss out on sightings of classic landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, the iconic switchbacks on Lombard Street and the charming Victorian houses known as the Painted Ladies.
San Francisco is also home to an illustrious art collection. SFOMA, the Legion of Honor and the Asian Art Museum all boast impressive collections that span across many different countries and centuries.
Visit the Mission District where you can find large-scale murals alongside the incredible Mission-style burritos at La Taqueria or the hard-to-get-into new American restaurant, AL's Place. While it may be a small city, San Francisco is big on energy, invention and interesting places for you to visit.
Your Ultimate Dining Guide to San Francisco
Discover all the best places to eat like a chef and critic with this guide to the top restaurants in san Francisco.
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The Rooftop Bars to Be Seen on in San Francisco
This guide to San Francisco outlines the best rooftop bars to visit if you're looking for a great view, a buzzy atmosphere, tasty food and delicious drinks.
The Complete Business Travellers' Guide to San Francisco
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Foodies flock to the Ferry Terminal Farmers Market where you can fill up on all the samples or try the phenomenal produce that's highly sought after by local chefs.
The forward-thinking isn't just reserved for tech-companies in San Fransisco. Restaurants like the whimsical Atelier Crenn and the stylishly seasonal Lord Stanley, are some of the most inventive and awarded kitchens in the world.
Join one of the many tour groups that head to the Napa Valley and Sonoma Wine Country for a drop or two of the region's best.
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Jump aboard one of San Francisco's biggest icons - the Cable Car. One place you won't be able to get to by Cable Car is the island of Alcatraz so make sure to book your cruise tour out to this infamous attraction well in advance.
A trip to the SF Zoo is a must with its huge playground, animal watching and a historic carousel. Kids will also love driving through the ancient redwood forests of Muir Woods which is less than an hour away from San Francisco.
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From the airport: you can get to your hotel easily on the efficient Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system or via an arrival transfer.
In and around the city: once you're in the city, the cable car is both a tourist highlight and great way to see San Francisco. There are also bus, ferry, taxi, the BART and the San Francisco hop-on hop-off tour.
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The Dangerous Notion of a Nationwide Crime Wave
Joseph Margulies
Posted in: Law Enforcement
In a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, Heather MacDonald, a conservative analyst with the Manhattan Institute, blamed the so-called "Ferguson effect" for the increase in violent crime experienced in several U.S. cities last year. As MacDonald sees it, criticism of law enforcement in the wake of police shootings has led the police to become timid and over-cautious. They have abandoned the field to the criminal element, she maintains, for which a resurgence of violent crime is the natural result.
MacDonald's foolishness has been widely ridiculed by an ideologically diverse assortment of journalists and academics, including political reporter Jason Linkins, FOX News columnist John R. Lott, and Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. Even New York police chief Bill Bratton has dismissed the idea of a crime wave. Writers have accused MacDonald of cherry-picking the data; overall, violent crime rates continue to drop in America's largest cities.
Yet there is a larger lesson to this brouhaha that has escaped attention. Drivel like MacDonald's is a serious threat to the principles of local self-determination that conservatives like her claim to champion, and the response to her nonsense should be a test of whether conservatives are genuinely committed to criminal justice reform.
The idea of a "nationwide crime wave" implies an effect that is both widespread and indiscriminate. Yet as I have noted before (here and here), in major cities of the United States, the great majority of violent crime is committed by a tiny fraction of the population in highly concentrated pockets of the city, largely against other people who engage in the same high-risk behavior.
In the past, I have not elaborated on this research, but MacDonald's Op-Ed makes it important to understand just how concentrated this violence has become. Recent studies of violent crime in Boston, for instance, found that from 1980 to 2008, only five percent of street segments and corners experienced 74 percent of gun assault incidents and that half the homicides and nearly 75 percent of the gun assaults were committed by fewer than one percent of the city's youth (aged 15–24), most of whom were chronic offenders and involved in a gang (access the research here and here).
Studies of crime in other major U.S. cities have consistently shown the same thing. In Cincinnati, for instance, research found that 0.3 percent of the population was "associated with" 75 percent of the homicides during a recent one-year period. Investigations in Seattle, Baltimore, and Chicago, among other places, confirm these results. Violent crime rates tick up or down based on a number of factors involving this group of people, but to an astounding degree, violent crime is confined to a miniscule fraction of the population and a similarly small segment of the city. It is certainly appropriate for the police to focus their attention on these people and places, and they do, but it is irresponsible lunacy to suggest, as MacDonald does, a "crime wave" based on this highly concentrated violence.
But the point is not simply that McDonald is wrong. She is dangerously wrong, in a way that should offend and alarm conservatives. If there is a North Star in American conservative thought, it is that local self-government is always and everywhere preferable to government imposed by distant overseers. Even the benevolent overlord, far removed from local conditions, cannot truly know of what she speaks. She acquires her information remotely and thus does not so much experience the local conditions as imagine them. Worse, democracy is not like riding a bike. It is more like speaking a new language. A community must be allowed to think and speak for itself, and if you deprive it of that opportunity, the skill will either never take hold or will wither from disuse.
And that is the unappreciated threat that looms when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal believes it has discovered evidence of a "nationwide crime wave." It is a dog whistle that summons distant politicians to "fix" a misunderstood crime problem of the inner city. But this is precisely how criminal justice policy took shape over the past five decades. Those least affected by crime, who were most apt to experience it only remotely and symbolically, imposed rules that governed the lives of those affected most directly and who experienced it as part of their daily lives. This colonial approach to criminal justice is exactly what reformers are trying to fix.
Yet MacDonald, mired in the past, stubbornly calls for more of the same. Her solution to an imagined "crime wave" is yet more social control imposed from the outside. According to her, we must stop, question, and arrest more people, for only that will restore order. Indeed, she is explicit on this score. She points out that in New York, pedestrian stops are down substantially from their 2011 high, mostly because a judge struck down the NYPD stop and frisk program as racially biased. "It is no surprise," MacDonald leaps, "that shootings are up in the city." Likewise, in St. Louis, MacDonald claims arrests are down by a third since the death of Michael Brown. "Not surprisingly," she writes, homicides in the city and robberies in the county are up dramatically.
I have written before about the heavy-handed policies MacDonald embraces so enthusiastically. Among other problems, they lead to a community being under- and over-policed at the same time by shifting police resources away from the behavior that matters and onto that which does not. At the same time, these practices systematically poison the relations between law enforcement and the communities they are meant to serve.
Perhaps all this could be justified if these strategies were the product of local, self-determined choice. But they are nothing of the sort. The men and women living in the communities ostensibly served by these strategies are the people who object to them most vehemently. Yet for many years, their voices—their right to local self-determination—have gone unheeded. It is therefore important that we condemn proposals like MacDonald's not simply as bad policy, but as an imperious call for social control, issued by people who are not touched by a problem but would nonetheless impose themselves on those who are.
MacDonald never engages with the reality of violent crime in American urban centers. She does not consider the significance of the fact, established over and over again, that violent crime in urban centers is tightly confined to a small number of people who victimize each other in a few pockets of the city, nor does she ponder what that might imply for conservative theory. She does not confront the substantial evidence that enforcement strategies of the sort she endorses, like the NYPD stop and frisk program, have virtually no effect on the violent crime she decries, even as they deprive communities of their voice. She is apparently oblivious to the targeted deterrence programs like those in Cincinnati and Stockton that focus police and community resources on the dangerous few instead of treating everyone in the community as part of the problem. Instead, she simply repeats the morally and empirically bankrupt call for ever more social control.
Views like MacDonald's simply cannot be squared with the conservative attachment to local self-determination. If conservatives are going to preach criminal justice reform, they must distance themselves from her apostasy.
Tags: Legal
Joseph Margulies is a Professor of Law and Government at Cornell University. He is the author of What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity (Yale 2013), and is also counsel for Abu Zubaydah, for whose interrogation the torture memo was written.
More Commentary by Joseph Margulies
The Curious Politics of Forgiveness
Dismantling the Falsest Comparison: Why a Woman's Right to Choose Has Nothing to Do With Nazism and Jim Crow
How Should A Progressive Prosecutor Respond to Injustice Beyond Her Courtroom?
A Welcome Turn to Violence
Seven Steps for Progressive Prosecutors
Election Day in Prison

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