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.
Castro/Upper Market registered three signals in June 2026 — one single-month drop, two sustained structural shifts, and one zero-event signal. The overall shape is strongly downward across vehicle-related property crime, with the sustained shifts pointing to a multi-year reconfiguration rather than a quiet month.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest move: 83 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a baseline of 190.22, and down 46.5% against the prior 12-month total of 155. Theft from vehicle is on the same trajectory — 145 incidents vs. 256 in the prior year, a 43.4% reduction that has now held long enough to register as a sustained shift. Robbery is the one category moving in the other direction, up 18.9% over 12 months (44 vs. 37), though it remains at low absolute volume.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 83 incidents — about 56% below the 190 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 145, down 43% from 256 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 83, down 47% from 155 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 June 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.”
Potrero Hill
79 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Castro/Upper Market's 83.
Open page →Hayes Valley
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Castro/Upper Market's 83.
Open page →Bernal Heights
92 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Castro/Upper Market's 83.
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.