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 below-trend signals and one sustained shift define April 2026 in Golden Gate Park — a broad, property-crime-heavy month with no spikes and no rare events. The movement runs consistently downward across vehicle-related and other property categories, making this a structurally quiet period rather than a one-category story.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signals: the trailing 12-month total is 35, down 23.9% against the prior year's 46, and running below its multi-year baseline of 65.22. Theft from vehicle shows the sharpest 12-month drop in the neighborhood — 70 incidents against 153 the year before, a 54.2% decline. Vandalism rounds out the top three movers and ran below trend as well, even as its 12-month total (47 vs. 46) is nearly flat year-over-year, suggesting a single low month pulled it into range. Burglary and aggravated assault, not in the top three signals, also registered multi-year declines of 42.9% and 35.3% respectively — every tracked category except robbery moved lower.
Notable signals 4
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 35 incidents — about 46% below the 65 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 70 incidents — about 91% below the 797 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 47 incidents — about 56% below the 107 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 24 incidents — about 43% below the 42 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 70, down 54% from 153 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 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 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.”
Glen Park
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Golden Gate Park's 35.
Open page →Chinatown
33 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Golden Gate Park's 35.
Open page →Inner Richmond
37 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Golden Gate Park's 35.
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.