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.
Three tracked signals surfaced in Castro/Upper Market this April — one single-month below-trend reading and two sustained structural shifts. The shape is broadly downward across vehicle-related property crime, with both theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft running below their multi-year baselines on a structural basis, not just a quiet month.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest individual signal: 93 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline of 191.06, and down 41.5% against the prior year's 159. Theft from vehicle also shows a sustained structural decrease, down 38.4% year-over-year (167 vs. 271). Everything else — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism — moved in the same downward direction on the 12-month comparison, though without crossing a signal threshold this period.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 93 incidents — about 51% below the 191 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 167, down 38% from 271 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 93, down 42% from 159 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 April 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.”
Hayes Valley
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Castro/Upper Market's 93.
Open page →Nob Hill
105 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 above Castro/Upper Market's 93.
Open page →Potrero Hill
80 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 below Castro/Upper Market's 93.
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.