Inner Sunset Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Inner Sunset is a residential neighborhood south of Golden Gate Park, organized around the cafes and restaurants at the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Irving Street. Its character is shaped by proximity to UCSF's Parnassus campus, family households in single-family homes, and the cool, foggy western weather of the city.
Four categories moved in Inner Sunset this September briefing. Three registered as single-month below-trend signals, theft from vehicle, vandalism, and motor vehicle theft, while a fourth carries a sustained-shift signal, indicating a structural shift that has been building over multiple months rather than a one-time dip. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime categories.
Theft from vehicle is the strongest signal: the trailing 12-month count stands at 60, against 141 in the prior 12 months, a 57.4% reduction year over year. Vandalism and motor vehicle theft moved in the same direction, down 30.0% and 33.3% respectively over the same window. Burglary, not in the top three this month but tracked in the same period, also fell 31.9%. Other Larceny was the one category that ran against the grain, essentially flat at 136 incidents versus 132 in the prior year, and Robbery edged up 27.3% on small absolute counts, 14 incidents versus 11.
Notable signals 3
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 60 incidents — about 79% below the 288 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 56 incidents — about 52% below the 116 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 38 incidents — about 64% below the 105 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 60, down 57% 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 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 Inner Sunset compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Golden Gate Park
59 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Inner Sunset's 60.
Open page →Oceanview/Merced/Ingleside
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Inner Sunset's 60.
Open page →Portola
63 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Inner Sunset's 60.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Inner Sunset, 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.