Potrero Hill Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Potrero Hill is a sunny residential neighborhood east of the Mission, with two distinct sides: the wealthier crest with its panoramic bay views, and the historically working-class flats below. Its short 18th Street commercial strip, the long-running Anchor Brewing facility, and a growing mix of design and tech offices give it a quietly mixed-use feel.
Two categories moved in Potrero Hill this August, both below trend. Robbery and aggravated assault each registered as below-trend signals, a narrow but coherent pattern: the neighborhood's two most serious crime categories are both running low relative to historical activity.
Over the trailing 12 months, aggravated assault stands at 18 incidents against 26 in the prior year, down 30.8%. Robbery sits at 5 incidents against 7, down 28.6%. Burglary and motor vehicle theft also declined on a 12-month basis, down 22.6% and 17.2% respectively, though neither produced a signal this month. Theft from vehicle and other larceny moved the other direction, up 5.5% and 20.4% year-over-year, but stayed within their expected ranges. Everything else, vandalism, arson, was within normal variation.
Notable signals 2
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 5 incidents — about 83% below the 30 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 18 incidents — about 67% below the 55 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Potrero Hill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Potrero Hill, 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.