In light of recent shootings in the Mission District, Mission Local set out to talk to our neighbors and hear their perspectives on the violence.

“It’s a lot of gang-related violence,” said Ricky, a Mission resident who lost two friends to gun violence recently. “The crime is unbearable, what goes on. The crime needs to stop with everybody getting murdered.”

Yet according to data, there has been a decrease in gun shootings in the community. Some residents feel at ease, citing that the abundance of people on the streets makes them feel safer when roaming the neighborhood. A few people even offered their own solutions to violence and community fear.

“When people talk about crime, one of the solutions they talk about is more police,” said Andrew Libson, a teacher at Mission High School. “I would just say that police is not an answer. If you want to reduce real violence, you’ve got to give people opportunities.”

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Senior Editor. Joe was born in Sweden and spent his early childhood in Chile, before moving to Oakland when he was eight. He attended Stanford University for political science and worked at Mission Local as a reporter after graduating, before spending time as a partner for the strategic communications firm The Worker Agency. He rejoined Mission Local as an editor in 2023.

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  1. worked and lived in the Mission for years in the 60’s and 70’s and remember it to be the same old, same old Mission and always being tagged as a tough crime ridden neighborhood ! It was never that way except for a few blocks then and I suspect now and unfortunately for some of the long time residents, is now undergoing “gentrification” which will push out the so=called undesirables and call it economic development. Nothing more than displacement of the locals.

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    1. Joseph, if you were here back in the 1960’s then, from what I’ve heard anyway, it was a mostly white working-class neighborhood.

      So the real locals were displaced decades ago and, insofar, as people are being displaced now, they are presumably the displacers of that time.

      What goes around, comes around, I guess.

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      1. It’s always been a working class neighborhood, until very recently when property values doubled in a few years. So working and middle class people have been forcefully displaced which is unprecedented.

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  2. La Mission multicultural barrio. Esta circunstancia de crimen puede suceder en cualquier parte de San Francisco. No dudo de las malas experiencias de algunas personas. Aun con todo esto el espiritud latino vibra presente.

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  3. Haha, love the guy at the end. “I’ve never had anything violent happen to me, so I don’t think this is a violent neighborhood so I dunno i’m oblivious to my surroundings hurr durr…”

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