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 September, three single-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The dominant shape is downward: motor vehicle theft, robbery, and burglary all ran below trend in the same month, with no spikes or rare events anywhere in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal, with 35 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 48 in the prior year, down 27.1%. Robbery is down even more sharply, 18 incidents over the past 12 months versus 41 the year before, a 56.1% reduction. Burglary fell 29.9% year over year, 54 incidents against 77. Theft from vehicle, while not in this month's top signals, is also substantially lower, 81 incidents against 200 in the prior 12 months. The one category moving in the other direction is aggravated assault, up 40.6% on a 12-month basis, 45 incidents against 32, which represents the sustained-shift signal and is the item most worth watching as the rest of the neighborhood trends down.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 35 incidents — about 62% below the 92 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 18 incidents — about 73% below the 66 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 54 incidents — about 60% below the 136 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 81, down 60% from 200 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 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.”
Inner Sunset
38 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above North Beach's 35.
Open page →Chinatown
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below North Beach's 35.
Open page →Noe Valley
41 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above North Beach's 35.
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.