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.
Two categories moved in Mission Bay this September, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a structural multi-year shift. The overall direction is downward across property crime, with no spikes and nothing moving against the grain.
Vandalism registered the stronger single-month signal, with the trailing 12 months at 81 incidents against 112 the prior year, down 27.7%. Theft from vehicle has moved well beyond a quiet month: at 50 incidents over the current 12 months versus 118 the year before, the 57.6% decline carries the weight of a sustained structural shift, not a one-period anomaly. Every other tracked category stayed within its normal range.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 81 incidents — about 46% below the 151 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 50, down 58% from 118 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 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.”
Pacific Heights
80 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Mission Bay's 81.
Open page →Russian Hill
75 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Mission Bay's 81.
Open page →Lakeshore
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Mission Bay's 81.
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 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.