Portola Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Portola is a working-class southeastern neighborhood, once known as the city's 'Garden District' for its 19th-century commercial nurseries. Today it is a quiet residential area along San Bruno Avenue, with a character distinct from the busier districts to the north.
Six categories moved in Portola this June — three one-month below-trend signals and three sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime, with no spikes and nothing running above trend except other larceny.
Burglary, theft from vehicle, and vandalism all ran below trend this month. The 12-month totals show how deep the structural moves run: burglary is down 50.0% against the prior year (23 incidents vs. 46), theft from vehicle is down 56.0% (62 vs. 141), and motor vehicle theft is down 59.2% (62 vs. 152). Aggravated assault held flat at 40 incidents year-over-year, and other larceny is the one category moving against the grain — up 4.8% to 131.
Notable signals 3
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 23 incidents — about 65% below the 65 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 62 incidents — about 74% below the 237 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 80 incidents — about 31% below the 116 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 62, down 59% from 152 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 62, down 56% from 141 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary 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 June 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 Portola compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Golden Gate Park
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Portola's 23.
Open page →Visitacion Valley
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Portola's 23.
Open page →Japantown
18 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Portola's 23.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Portola, 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.