Financial District/South Beach Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Financial District is San Francisco's downtown business core — the city's tallest skyline, including Salesforce Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid, sits within its boundaries. South Beach extends the district to the Embarcadero waterfront and Oracle Park, mixing high-rise condos and corporate offices with a public bayfront promenade.
Five categories moved in Financial District/South Beach this September: two single-month drops and three sustained shifts, all pointing in the same direction. The structural pattern is broadly downward across both property crime and violent crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft and vandalism both ran below trend this month on a single-month basis, while burglary, along with two other categories, has shifted structurally over the trailing 12 months. The 12-month totals show the scale of those moves: burglary is at 207 vs. 320 the prior year, down 35.3%, and theft from vehicle is at 263 vs. 437, down 39.8%. Aggravated assault and robbery are also well below prior-year levels, at 91 vs. 125 and 84 vs. 103 respectively. Arson is the one category running above its prior-year count, 18 vs. 14, though volumes remain low.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 162 incidents — about 35% below the 249 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 295 incidents — about 56% below the 674 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 263, down 40% from 437 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 207, down 35% from 320 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 162, down 27% from 223 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 Financial District/South Beach 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.”
Western Addition
126 incidents over the past 12 months — 36 below Financial District/South Beach's 162.
Open page →Nob Hill
117 incidents over the past 12 months — 45 below Financial District/South Beach's 162.
Open page →Sunset/Parkside
101 incidents over the past 12 months — 61 below Financial District/South Beach's 162.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Financial District/South Beach, 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.