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.
Four categories moved in North Beach this August, three one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward across both violent and property crime, with robbery, motor vehicle theft, and burglary all running below their recent baselines in the same month.
Robbery is the clearest move: 19 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 42 in the year before, down 54.8%. Burglary and theft from vehicle show similar 12-month compression, burglary down 32.9% (53 vs. 79) and theft from vehicle down 54.7% (96 vs. 212). Aggravated assault is the one category moving the other direction, up 10.5% over the same period, though it did not cross the signal threshold this month. Every other tracked category remained within its normal range.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 19 incidents — about 71% below the 66 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 40 incidents — about 57% below the 93 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 53 incidents — about 61% below the 137 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 96, down 55% from 212 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
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 robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Lone Mountain/USF
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above North Beach's 19.
Open page →Visitacion Valley
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above North Beach's 19.
Open page →Pacific Heights
17 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below North Beach's 19.
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.