It's funny you say that because many people I know said they've simply stopped recording or responding to crime because everyone knows there will be no consequences for arresting somebody and the risk isn't worth arresting people in most cases.
The prediction was that next people would use the evidence that there are fewer crimes being reported as proof that nothing is wrong. This does seem very much like what we are seeing here.
Because it's least susceptible to reporting bias, and being an extreme, also offers a base point for interpolation, to independently estimate numbers of lessor crimes, especially violent ones.
That's true, but if you don't focus on murders, 2020 was one of the lowest violent crime years on record looking at SF, CA as a whole, or the entire US, so 2021 having an increase in crime is nothing more than reversion to the mean.
If all crimes resulted in dead bodies in the aftermath, I would agree with your reasoning here. But even violent crimes, most of the time, do not produce a dead body.
So given how flawed that premise was to begin with, I don't think an explanation is needed for why your overall point is disingenuous at best.
I feel like from a criminological standpoint, we would have some understanding (or even a heuristic) about the reportedness of crimes and if they are rising/falling in proportion to reported crimes.
There is. For instance, you can look at other sources, such as insurance claims; people file them to get paid, they dont care if the party responsible is prosecuted.
People trying to hype up the crime thing deliberately ignore these sources because, as you can see, it allows them to make up as much crime as they can imagine and base their argument on that.
The prediction was that next people would use the evidence that there are fewer crimes being reported as proof that nothing is wrong. This does seem very much like what we are seeing here.