Mission Bay Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Mission Bay is a planned redevelopment district built on former Southern Pacific railyards south of downtown, anchored by UCSF's research campus and the Warriors' Chase Center arena. The area is dominated by new mid-rise residential buildings, biotech offices, and a still-evolving street grid that did not exist twenty years ago.
Three signals surfaced in Mission Bay this March — one one-month below-trend move and two sustained structural shifts. The shape is broadly downward: vandalism and theft from vehicle have both been running below their multi-year baselines for long enough to register as structural changes, not single-month noise.
Vandalism is the sharpest mover: the current 12-month total is 91 incidents against a prior-year figure of 132 — down 31.1% — and the trailing 12 months sit well below the multi-year baseline of 152.67. Theft from vehicle shows an even steeper year-over-year decline, 74 incidents this year against 138 last year, a 46.4% decrease that has now held long enough to qualify as a sustained shift. Everything else — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny, motor vehicle theft — ran within its expected range this month.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 91 incidents — about 40% below the 153 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 74, down 46% from 138 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 91, down 31% from 132 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 Mission Bay 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.”
Russian Hill
91 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Mission Bay's 91.
Open page →Outer Mission
94 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Mission Bay's 91.
Open page →Outer Richmond
104 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 above Mission Bay's 91.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Mission Bay, 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.