Golden Gate Park Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Golden Gate Park is San Francisco's flagship 1,017-acre urban park, larger than New York's Central Park and stretching three miles from the Haight to the Pacific. It contains the de Young Museum, the California Academy of Sciences, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers, and a network of meadows, lakes, and gardens.
Four categories ran below trend in Golden Gate Park this September, all of them drops, with no spikes or rare events in the mix. The structural direction is broadly downward across both property crime and violent crime, a consistent pattern rather than a single outlier month.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signals: 27 incidents over the current 12 months against 43 in the prior year, down 37.2%. Aggravated assault fell further on a percentage basis, 5 incidents this year against 17 the prior year, a 70.6% reduction. Burglary and theft from vehicle also ran below trend, with theft from vehicle at 59 incidents versus 90 the prior year, down 34.4%. Everything else, robbery, other larceny, and vandalism, came in within range or showed only minor year-over-year movement.
Notable signals 4
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 27 incidents — about 58% below the 64 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 5 incidents — about 75% below the 20 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 22 incidents — about 47% below the 42 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 32 incidents — about 69% below the 103 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Golden Gate Park 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.”
Treasure Island
28 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Golden Gate Park's 27.
Open page →Glen Park
25 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Golden Gate Park's 27.
Open page →Chinatown
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Golden Gate Park's 27.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Golden Gate Park, 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.