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.
Four categories moved in Potrero Hill this June — three one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward, with robbery, vandalism, and aggravated assault all running below trend on the month, and at least one category reflecting a longer multi-month structural decline.
Robbery is the sharpest move: 5 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a prior-year total of 11, down 54.5%. Aggravated assault is down 41.2% year-over-year (20 incidents vs. 34), and vandalism sits 9.5% below the prior 12-month period. Every other tracked category in Potrero Hill also came in below its prior-year level, with motor vehicle theft down 41.5% and burglary down 25.0%.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 5 incidents — about 84% below the 31 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 86 incidents — about 52% below the 179 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 64% below the 56 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 79, down 42% from 135 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 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.