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.
Seven tracked signals surfaced in Potrero Hill this April — five below-trend drops and two sustained structural shifts. The shape is broadly and consistently downward across the neighborhood, with no spikes and no rare-event activity. The month reads as a continuation of a multi-year compression in crime volume, not a single-category anomaly.
Robbery, Vandalism, and Aggravated Assault all ran below trend this month. The 12-month picture reinforces the signal: Robbery is down 50.0% against the prior year (7 incidents vs. 14), Aggravated Assault is down 48.7% (20 vs. 39), and Motor Vehicle Theft has dropped 45.9% (80 vs. 148). Every tracked category in Potrero Hill is lower year-over-year, with no category posting a gain.
Notable signals 5
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 7 incidents — about 78% below the 31 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 83 incidents — about 54% below the 181 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 65% below the 57 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 101 incidents — about 46% below the 187 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 80 incidents — about 61% below the 207 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 80, down 46% from 148 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 101, down 31% from 147 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 April 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.”
Glen Park
6 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Potrero Hill's 7.
Open page →Golden Gate Park
6 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Potrero Hill's 7.
Open page →McLaren Park
5 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Potrero Hill's 7.
Open page →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.