Nob Hill Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Nob Hill is a steep, wealthy district crowned by historic luxury hotels like the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins, the Gothic Grace Cathedral, and the cable cars that climb its slopes. Long associated with the railroad and silver-mining elite who rebuilt the area after the 1906 earthquake, it remains a residential and hotel district with sweeping bay views.
Seven categories moved in Nob Hill this March — four ran below trend on a single-month basis, three registered as sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across both property crime and violent categories, with no spikes or rare-event signals anywhere in the mix.
Vandalism, motor vehicle theft, and theft from vehicle lead the top three signals, all below trend. The 12-month vandalism total of 199 sits well under its multi-year baseline, and the category's trailing 12-month count has fallen 23.5% against the prior year. Theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft are moving in the same direction — down 48.7% and 40.9% year-over-year respectively — while robbery's 12-month total of 41 is half the 82 recorded the year before. Other Larceny is the one counter-trend: up 18.0% against the prior 12 months, with 472 incidents against 400 the year before.
Notable signals 4
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 199 incidents — about 36% below the 310 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 101 incidents — about 51% below the 207 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 203 incidents — about 67% below the 616 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 121 incidents — about 53% below the 260 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 203, down 49% from 396 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 101, down 41% from 171 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 41, down 50% from 82 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 Nob Hill 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.”
Sunset/Parkside
191 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Nob Hill's 199.
Open page →Western Addition
225 incidents over the past 12 months — 26 above Nob Hill's 199.
Open page →Hayes Valley
169 incidents over the past 12 months — 30 below Nob Hill's 199.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Nob Hill, 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.