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 in August 2026, all of them downward. Four registered as single-month below-trend signals; two are classified as sustained structural shifts, meaning the lower levels extend well beyond this month's read. The overall shape is a broad, multi-category pullback across both violent and property crime.
Burglary is the strongest single signal, down 39.5% over the trailing 12 months, 23 incidents against 38 in the prior year. Theft from vehicle and vandalism both ran below trend as well, with theft from vehicle falling 51.9% year-over-year, 64 incidents against 133. Other larceny is the one category running in the opposite direction, up 22.1% on 149 incidents against 122, and stands out as the exception in an otherwise broadly declining month.
Notable signals 4
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 23 incidents — about 64% below the 65 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 68 incidents — about 41% below the 116 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 64 incidents — about 73% below the 235 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 58 incidents — about 68% below the 181 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 64, down 52% from 133 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 58, down 53% from 124 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 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.”
Visitacion Valley
22 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Portola's 23.
Open page →Golden Gate Park
21 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Portola's 23.
Open page →Japantown
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 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.