Castro/Upper Market Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Castro is San Francisco's historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood and one of the most prominent gay districts in the country, anchored by the 1922 Castro Theatre and the rainbow crosswalks at Castro and 18th Streets. It runs into Upper Market, a livelier commercial stretch of restaurants, bars, and shops along the F-Market streetcar line.
Four categories moved in Castro/Upper Market this August. One registered a single-month below-trend signal, three are structural multi-month shifts, and one category recorded a zero-event period. The dominant shape is a broad, sustained decline across property crime, not a single noisy month.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal: 76 incidents in the current 12 months against 140 in the prior year, down 45.7%. Burglary and theft from vehicle are both in sustained downward shifts, off 29.4% and 38.0% respectively over the same window. Aggravated assault is the one counter-trend, up 10.3% year-over-year (43 incidents vs. 39), but everything else in the property crime categories is running well below where it stood a year ago.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 76 incidents — about 60% below the 189 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 142, down 38% from 229 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 76, down 46% from 140 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 161, down 29% from 228 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 August 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 Castro/Upper Market compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Marina
76 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Castro/Upper Market's 76.
Open page →Pacific Heights
78 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Castro/Upper Market's 76.
Open page →Outer Richmond
73 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Castro/Upper Market's 76.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Castro/Upper Market, 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.