San Francisco Mayor London Breed spoke about the safety issues in the city on Saturday 8 April following the stabbing death of Mr Lee and the attack on the former fire commissioner.

Ms Breed was taking questions at the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival, according to ABC7.

“I want to start by making it clear that in both of these cases, the information is still not yet public – they’re under investigation,” she said.

She urged the public to not get ahead of the facts.

“When the facts of many of these cases come out, many people are going to be surprised,” the mayor said, adding that social media has been a platform where the safety in the city has been questioned.

“It has really heightened events like this as well as people jumping to conclusions about what they think is happening,” she said.

Actor and model Sara Foster has blamed the “liberal” politicians leading San Francisco following the stabbing death of the co-founder of Cash App Bob Lee.

The tech guru called 911 and said he was bleeding out as he lay dying from his wounds on a street in the city, new audio has revealed.

Police found the 43-year-old unconscious on the pavement at around 2.40am on Tuesday, about six minutes after he called the emergency services to say that he had been attacked and was bleeding heavily, according to The San Francisco Standard.

Mr Lee was taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he passed away.

Little information has been released about the stabbing and the authorities haven’t shared any details about a possible suspect.

Despite initially overseeing a $120m reinvestment from the SFPD budget to other social service programmes aimed at minority communities, San Francisco Mayor London Breed has emerged as a backer for increased police funding.

Some experts say it is this inequality that drives public safety issues in San Francisco.

“There is not a crime spike happening, except in limited areas,” James King, a criminal justice reform activist in the Bay Area with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, told Jewish Currents last year. “But what is, I hope, peaking is frustration with a diminishing quality of life as a result of the pandemic. The pandemic revealed serious inequities in our society, as well as a lack of social safety net infrastructure to mitigate them.”

He added that San Franciscans sometimes have a heightened perception of crime and disorder because of the visibility of problems like the lack of housing.

“That type of visibility causes genuine discomfort for people who have more resources,” Mr King continued. “What’s lacking is any type of plan to deal with the root causes of what we’re seeing.”

In the face of this reality, where Fortune 500 companies share blocks with encampments of homeless people, many within the tech and business communities have complained that city officials don’t do enough to stop crime.

The city of Jackson, Mississippi, the place with the highest per capita murder rate by some measures, had nearly 13 times more murders per capita than San Francisco, according to city police data.

Following Lee’s death, many on social media, particulary in the close-knit tech world, echoed the Tesla founder’s point, with one Redditor who said they knew Lee writing, “I’m getting so sick of all the needless violence in SF.”

How violent is San Francisco? Have city officials given up on fighting crime? And do San Francisco police really release violent offenders, as Mr Musk claims? The answer, as with so much when it comes to online debates, is far more complicated that what’s playing out on social media.

To start, the city isn’t among the most dangerous in America, according to statistics.

Those cities –Jackson, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; Birmingham, Alabama; St Louis, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin – were almost all concentrated in the Midwest and South in Republican-controlled states with high poverty rates.

In fact, violent crime rates have largely been declining in San Francisco since peaking in the 1990s, with the beginning of 2022 marking the lowest level of reported violent crime since 1985, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Many people I know have been severely assaulted,” Mr Musk tweeted on Wednesday. “Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.”

Residents of the Sunset District in San Francisco have criticised the lack of focus on crime in the neighbourhood following the stabbing of tech executive Bob Lee.

“The focus has been on downtown and that’s not all of San Francisco. San Francisco has neighbourhoods, they need to be equally represented in terms of police, fire, the works,” Helen Smith told ABC7.

“We don’t have the right number of policemen,” she added.

“Right now, all the places are not safe, even in the Sunset that’s why we [are] concerned about it,” Elaine Trang said.

The San Francisco Police Department is short of 548 officers even as applications increase, Chief Bill Scott has said.

“Our applications have gone up we’re double where we were last year on applications,” he said, according to ABC7.

Supervisor Joel Engardio represents the largest neighbourhood in the city, the Sunset District.

“I want to point out some good news. We have got to think about some good news today. I’m hopeful because you see our district attorney and our police chief sitting together here ... I cannot emphasize enough how important this is,” he said on Thursday night.

“We have to do all this together because we do well when we can do it together but we still have a long way to go,” Shief Scott added.

Lee was generous with his time coaching and championing fellow engineers and entrepreneurs, said Wesley Chan, co-founder of FPV Ventures. The two met more than a decade ago when they both worked at Google, where Lee helped to build the Android smartphone operating system before its 2008 release.

Lee’s death has further enflamed debate over public safety in San Francisco and its moribund downtown, which has not yet bounced back from the pandemic. Twitter’s owner Elon Musk took to the social media site to post that “violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.” Musk tagged the city’s district attorney in the post.

San Francisco suffers from property crime more than violent crime such as murder, rape, robbery and assault. In a statement, San Francisco Mayor London Breed called the homicide “a horrible tragedy” and said that the city is prioritizing public safety.

Longtime friend Tommy Sowers said it’s hard to picture what led to Lee’s violent death.

“I can’t imagine a situation where he would instigate a conflict,” he said. “That’s the tragedy of it.”