Chinatown Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America, a dense residential and commercial enclave packed into roughly 24 city blocks around Grant and Stockton. Beyond its famous Dragon Gate and tourist storefronts, it remains a tightly-knit residential district of active markets, alleys, and family associations dating to the 19th century.
Four tracked signals shaped April 2026 in Chinatown — one single-month below-trend signal and three sustained structural shifts. The structural pattern is mixed: burglary is down sharply over the trailing year, while aggravated assault has moved in the opposite direction as a multi-month trend, not a one-off.
Burglary is the clearest mover: the current 12-month total is 57 incidents against a baseline mean of 110, and 57 against 121 in the prior year — a 52.9% year-over-year drop that registers both as a single-month signal and a sustained structural decline. Aggravated assault is the counterweight, up 81.8% year-over-year (60 incidents vs. 33), a sustained shift that has been building across multiple months. Theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft both ran lower on a 12-month basis — down 32.5% and 29.8% respectively — but neither crossed the anomaly threshold this period.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 57 incidents — about 48% below the 110 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 57, down 53% from 121 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 137, down 33% from 203 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 60, up 82% from 33 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 Chinatown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Inner Richmond
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Chinatown's 57.
Open page →Presidio Heights
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Chinatown's 57.
Open page →Outer Mission
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Chinatown's 57.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Chinatowndoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Chinatown's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across San Francisco); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Chinatown, 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.