North Beach Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
North Beach is San Francisco's historic neighborhood at the foot of Telegraph Hill and the birthplace of West Coast Beat literature, home to City Lights Bookstore, Vesuvio Cafe, and the espresso bars around Columbus Avenue. The triangle around Washington Square Park, beneath Coit Tower, retains a strong neighborhood-cafe culture alongside its better-known nightlife.
Five categories moved in North Beach this April — three one-month below-trend signals and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property and violent crime, with no spikes and nothing running above trend.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest single signal: 43 incidents over the current 12 months against a multi-year baseline mean of 94.57. Robbery is down 50.0% year-over-year — 23 incidents vs. 46 in the prior 12 months — and burglary also ran below trend, off 17.3% to 67 incidents. Theft from vehicle, while not in the top three anomalies this month, sits at 141 incidents against 405 in the prior year, a 65.2% decline that reflects the sustained-shift pattern rather than a single quiet month.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 43 incidents — about 55% below the 95 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 23 incidents — about 66% below the 68 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 67 incidents — about 52% below the 140 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 141, down 65% from 405 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 23, down 50% from 46 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 April 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 North Beach compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Lone Mountain/USF
48 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above North Beach's 43.
Open page →Inner Richmond
37 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below North Beach's 43.
Open page →Glen Park
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below North Beach's 43.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for North Beach, 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.