Cash App founder stabbed – latest: Bob Lee argued over Nima Momeni’s sister before murder, court told

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.

Last month, she asked the city Board of Supervisors to approve a $27m budget supplemental to fund police overtime. Between 2019 and 2022, even with the $120m cuts, the SFPD budget still grew by 4.4 per cent, and none of the reinvestments cut active-duty officer positions, KGO reported.

In the last five years, San Francisco police clearance rates for assault and robbery also declined. San Francisco police have said some issues are the result of staffing issues, and that the department is running at about 75 per cent capacity.

The mayor’s stance on policing has even won plaudits from the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Nonetheless, a perception remains that city officials are soft on crime, with much of the anger funneled at former DA Chesa Boudin, who was eventually recalled in 2022. He took steps alternatively celebrated by criminal justice reformers and reviled by critics, such as rolling back the use of often racially disproportionate “sentence enhancements,” and directing prosecutors to consider the immigration status of certain drug criminals and avoid high-level charges against non-violent offenders who could be deported.

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.

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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.

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.

Regarding the perception among some that violent crime was taking over San Francisco, Ms Breed said that the city is taking steps to address the issue, such as $25m in funding for police overtime.

“It continues to allow us to do our jobs here and to make sure we’re not only out on the streets to respond to calls for service, but it provides us the ability to do these investigations around the clock,” Ms Breed said.

The city’s police department is more than 500 officers short but the mayor said more applications to join the force are coming in.

“We’re starting to see those applications come in,” she said, adding that a request has been sent to the federal government to help deal with the sale of drugs.

“It looks as though we are probably going to get some support from hopefully the state and federal government and we’ll be able to make that clear what that entails,” she said.

Supervisor Dean Preson represents the Tenderloin District.

“There were stabbings and shootings in my district the Tenderloin over this last week as well, including a homicide, this is obviously incredibly disturbing,” he said, according to ABC7.

The mayor added that “we need to really go aggressively against open-air drug dealing in the Tenderloin not just from a local level, but a state and federal level and I think when that support kicks in it’s going to be a new day in San Francisco”.

It’s been over one week since Robert Harold “Crazy Bob” Lee was stabbed to death in San Francisco, and police are yet to publicly identify any suspects.

Cash App founder Lee, 43, was spotted on surveillance footage stumbling along Main St in Rincon Hill at around 2.30am on 4 April pleading for help.

In a 911 call, Lee reportedly said “someone stabbed me”. He died in hospital soon after being found by authorities.

The high-profile slaying of the MobileCoin chief product officer has shaken San Francisco and placed a spotlight on the city’s crime rates.

Lee’s incensed friends in the tech community blamed the city’s pursuit of progressive law enforcement policies, with one claiming they had “Bob’s literal blood on their hands”.

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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.

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.

Despite being one of the country’s largest cities by population, San Francisco wasn’t in the top 10 cities with the highest homicide rate in the US, according to an analysis of local and federal crime data from WLBT.

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.

After relocating from San Francisco to Miami in October last year, Lee had returned to attend a MobileCoin leadership conference in the city, friends say.

Surveillance footage taken at 2.30am on 4 April from the Portside apartment building at 403 Main St showed a mortally wounded Lee desperately trying to find help.

The footage captured Lee approaching several cars while clutching his stab wounds in one hand and his cell phone in the other.

He lifts his shirt to show the driver of a parked Toyota Camry the extent of his injuries, but the car immediately drives off.

Lee called 911 at 2.34am pleading for help, according to a recording. Police arrived six minutes later, and summoned medics to the scene. Lee was rushed to San Fransisco General Hospital where he died soon afterwards.

Police refused to confirm whether a man who was spotted on CCTV wheeling a suitcase away from the area where Lee was murdered was a suspect.

It’s also unclear whether a murder weapon has been recovered, if any personal items were stolen, or what Lee was doing prior to being stabbed. Police have not responded to numerous requests for comment by The Independent.

Mr Lee had been staying about half a mile from where he was found with fatal stab wounds at the 1 Hotel on the Embarcadero, according to the San Francisco Standard.

CCTV from the Lumina apartment building, which neighbours the Portside, has also been reviewed by police.

The area close to downtown San Francisco is home to Google’s city headquarters and luxury high-rise apartment buildings. The median household income in the area was more than $244,000, according to the last Census.

Lee’s distraught friends and colleagues in the tech world quickly linked his death to the city’s “lawlessness” and recidivism. Many presumed that the stabbing was an attempted robbery.

Lee had apparently stayed on in San Francisco for an extra day after the conference had ended.

His estranged wife Krista and two daughters Dagny and Scout reportedly still live in San Francisco.

In his first public statement a day after Lee’s death, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said that was too early to provide any information on evidence they had gathered or speculate on a motive or the circumstances of the killing.

Mr Scott added that every lead was being pursued tirelessly in the case.

Two days later, Mr Scott told CBS San Francisco it was still too soon to know whether the stabbing was a random attack. He added that the lack of information being released was due to police wanting to preserve the integrity of the investigation.

In the hours after Lee’s death, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins was asked on Twitter by Elon Musk what she was doing to lock up repeat violent offenders.

While not addressing Mr Musk directly, Ms Jenkins responded the following day to say it was her “top priority”.

“As a former homicide prosecutor, I have a deep understanding of how these investigations & prosecutions work. I direct our staff to ensure that cases are vigorously prosecuted.”

Conspiracy theories and attacks on the San Francisco Police Department’s supposed toothless response to violent crime quickly filled the information void.

Amid a deluge of social media criticism, Police Commissioner Kevin Benedicto said at a public meeting on Wednesday that some were “exploiting this horrific incident for political gain”.

“I find it premature and distasteful to try to fit this horrifying act of violence into a preconceived narrative and use it to advance a political agenda,” Mr Benedicto added.

On Monday, Mayor London Breed urged the public not to rush to conclusions about Lee’s murder and a brutal attack on former San Francisco Fire commissioner Don Carmigiani.

“When the facts of many of these cases come out, many people are going to be surprised,” Ms Breed said in comments to media at the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco.

While most city officials pushed back at claims that violence was out of control in the city, District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio acknowledged that many residents were living in fear.

In a Twitter thread last week, he said the city police department Ms Jenkins was rebuilding a prosecutor’s office that had been “dismantled by her predecessor” Chesa Boudin, who was recalled last year.

“It’s no consolation to say San Francisco had three times as many murders in the 1970s. What matters is how people feel today and they don’t feel safe,” Mr Engardio said.

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.