Outer Richmond Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Outer Richmond is a foggy residential neighborhood at San Francisco's western edge, running from the Pacific coast to the Inner Richmond border. It is best known for the historic Cliff House and Sutro Baths ruins overlooking the ocean, low-rise rows of family homes, and a quiet, fog-belt rhythm.
Six categories moved in Outer Richmond this March — two one-month below-trend signals and four sustained structural shifts, all pointing in the same direction. The dominant shape is a broad, multi-year contraction in property crime across the neighborhood, not a single noisy month.
Burglary is the clearest structural story: 82 incidents over the current 12 months against 205 in the prior year, a 60.0% reduction that registers as a sustained shift rather than a one-month dip. Vandalism and motor vehicle theft both ran below trend on the month — vandalism's current 12-month total of 104 sits well below its multi-year baseline — and theft from vehicle is down 38.9% year-over-year (138 vs. 226). Robbery and aggravated assault were within normal range, each moving less than 5% against the prior 12 months.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 104 incidents — about 47% below the 195 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 83 incidents — about 55% below the 184 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 82, down 60% from 205 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 138, down 39% from 226 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 83, down 37% from 132 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 104, down 34% from 158 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 Outer Richmond 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.”
Excelsior
105 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Outer Richmond's 104.
Open page →Lakeshore
105 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Outer Richmond's 104.
Open page →West of Twin Peaks
107 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Outer Richmond's 104.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Outer Richmond, 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.