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.
Six categories moved in Financial District/South Beach this month — three ran below trend in the current window and three registered as sustained structural shifts. The pattern is broadly downward across both property crime and the few violent categories tracked here, with no spikes in the mix.
Arson, vandalism, and motor vehicle theft are the three below-trend signals this month. Motor vehicle theft is down 40.4% over the trailing 12 months (171 incidents vs. 287 the prior year), theft from vehicle is down 46.1% (327 vs. 607), and robbery has fallen 49.6% (71 vs. 141). The three sustained-shift signals reinforce the same direction — these aren't single quiet months but multi-month structural moves across the category mix.
Notable signals 3
Arson
The past 12 months saw 11 incidents — about 64% below the 31 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 350 incidents — about 50% below the 695 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 171 incidents — about 31% below the 248 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 327, down 46% from 607 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 171, down 40% from 287 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 71, down 50% from 141 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 March 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 arson 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 arson levels.”
Bernal Heights
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Financial District/South Beach's 11.
Open page →Nob Hill
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Financial District/South Beach's 11.
Open page →Castro/Upper Market
8 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Financial District/South Beach's 11.
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, 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.