Putting Out the Fire on the Bob Lee Murder

Bob Lee (Chron photo)

Bob Lee, Google alumnus and inventor of Square's Cash App, was stabbed to death on the streets of San Francisco on Tuesday night.

San Francisco’s tech community mourned the violent death of one of their own Wednesday, calling Cash App founder Bob Lee a standout among Silicon Valley geniuses, someone idolized as a brilliant thinker, talented hacker and idealist who turned dreams into reality...

Lee, 43, who was visiting from his home in Miami, died at a hospital following the 2:35 a.m. Tuesday attack on the 300 block of Main Street, where police responded to a report of a stabbing and found Lee unconscious on the ground with two stab wounds to his chest. They called medics to the scene and started aid before rushing him to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died.

Bob Lee's death, for now, is a local cause célèbre because it symbolizes all that has gone wrong in San Francisco:

the tech community has been raising alarm about the state of San Francisco, arguing that crime and fear about public safety are factors deterring companies and employees from returning to the city’s hollowed-out downtown.

With the city’s core already facing down a potential “doom loop” scenario in which increasingly empty offices and streets lead to economic decay, some in tech, including Twitter CEO Elon Musk, immediately seized on the killing...

“Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately,” Musk wrote on Twitter, tagging District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and demanding to know what her office is doing to jail violent repeat offenders.

Your humble observer finds the media response interesting. In the Chronicle articles on this tragedy there are repeated mentions that violent crime is down in San Francisco and that homicides are rare.

Its reporting is in sharp contrast to the 2020 George Floyd murder, in which one death became emblematic of widespread police brutality and systematic racism. In the Floyd case sweeping derogatory generalizations were made about wide swaths of society, while in the Lee murder the media is trying to prevent those generalizations from being applied to San Francisco and possibly other urban centers.

In 2020 it was easy to light the flame. In 2023 we will see how easy it is to put it out.

Note: if Bob Lee was shot, gun violence would have likely been the story...and a diversion from confronting crime and fear in San Francisco.