Bernal Heights Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Bernal Heights is a hilltop residential neighborhood south of the Mission, organized around the open green space of Bernal Heights Park and the cafes and shops of Cortland Avenue. Predominantly single-family Victorian and stucco homes, it draws families and longtime San Franciscans for its panoramic city views and quiet streets.
Six categories moved in Bernal Heights this September, split evenly between one-month below-trend signals and sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property and violent crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Theft from vehicle, vandalism, and aggravated assault are the three strongest signals, all running below trend. Theft from vehicle is the most notable: the trailing 12 months came in at 99 incidents against 182 in the prior year, down 45.6%. Aggravated assault fell 26.5% on the same comparison, 50 incidents against 68, and vandalism dropped 23.5%, from 162 to 124. The three sustained-shift signals reinforce that these are not single-month moves; the declines in Bernal Heights extend across the multi-year window.
Notable signals 3
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 99 incidents — about 75% below the 391 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 124 incidents — about 46% below the 231 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 50 incidents — about 38% below the 81 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 166, down 58% from 397 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 99, down 46% from 182 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 94, down 33% from 141 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Bernal Heights compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable theft from vehicle levels.”
Noe Valley
97 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Bernal Heights's 99.
Open page →West of Twin Peaks
103 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Bernal Heights's 99.
Open page →Excelsior
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Bernal Heights's 99.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Bernal Heights, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset on DataSF, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to neighborhood × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.