Japantown Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
San Francisco's Japantown is one of just three historic Japantowns remaining in the United States, centered on the open-air Japan Center, the Peace Pagoda, and a few cherry-blossom-lined blocks around Post and Buchanan. It survived wartime internment and 1960s redevelopment to remain a cultural and culinary anchor in the Bay Area.
Two categories moved in Japantown this August, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a multi-month structural shift. The overall picture is broadly downward across property crime, with no spikes and nothing running above trend.
Vandalism registered a one-month below-trend signal; the trailing 12-month total is 26 incidents against 43 in the year prior, a 39.5% reduction. Theft from vehicle is the more durable story: 47 incidents over the current 12 months against 108 in the prior year, down 56.5%, a sustained shift that has been building across multiple months rather than a single quiet period. Robbery and motor vehicle theft are also lower year-over-year, down 44.4% and 32.4% respectively, though neither crossed a signal threshold this month.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 26 incidents — about 64% below the 73 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 47, down 57% from 108 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 August 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Japantown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Glen Park
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Japantown's 26.
Open page →Twin Peaks
29 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Japantown's 26.
Open page →Golden Gate Park
34 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Japantown's 26.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Japantown, 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.