Pacific Heights Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Pacific Heights is one of San Francisco's wealthiest neighborhoods — a hilltop district of grand Victorian and Edwardian mansions, embassies, and consulates with sweeping views of the bay. Its commercial spines along Fillmore and Sacramento Streets carry boutiques, restaurants, and the kind of low-key luxury that has long defined the area.
Four categories moved in Pacific Heights this September, and the shape is broadly downward across property crime. Two registered as single-month below-trend signals, vandalism and motor vehicle theft, while theft from vehicle has shifted structurally over the trailing 12 months, a sustained multi-month move rather than one quiet month. A zero-event signal rounds out the mix.
Vandalism is the clearest move: 80 incidents in the current 12 months against 149 in the prior year, down 46.3%. Theft from vehicle tells a similar longer-term story, 152 incidents now versus 250 in the prior 12 months, a 39.2% reduction. Motor vehicle theft also ran below trend this month, with the 12-month total at 78 against 89 the year before. The two categories that bucked the direction, robbery and burglary, are up 36.4% and 20.2% respectively over the same window, so the picture is not uniformly calm, but property crime in the aggregate is moving lower.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 80 incidents — about 56% below the 184 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 78 incidents — about 43% 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 152, down 39% from 250 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 80, down 46% from 149 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 Pacific Heights 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.”
Mission Bay
81 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Pacific Heights's 80.
Open page →Russian Hill
75 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Pacific Heights's 80.
Open page →Portola
72 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Pacific Heights's 80.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Pacific Heights, 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.