Russian Hill Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
Russian Hill is a steep residential neighborhood north of Nob Hill, famous worldwide for the eight switchbacks of Lombard Street and the Hyde-Powell cable car that climbs its slopes. Behind the postcard streets, it is a quietly affluent area of apartment buildings and small homes mixed with the cafes and shops of Polk Street.
Russian Hill logged five tracked signals in June 2026 — three single-month below-trend moves and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward: every category that moved did so in the same direction, with no fresh spikes or rare events in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signal list, with a 12-month total of 52 against a multi-year baseline mean of 118.1 — down 40.9% against the prior year's 88. Aggravated assault and vandalism also ran below trend this month; aggravated assault's 12-month count of 5 compares to 22 in the prior period, a 77.3% reduction. Theft from vehicle is down 37.7% over the same window (142 vs. 228), reinforcing the structural picture — property crime categories that drove volume in prior years are all tracking lower. Robbery and other larceny moved in the other direction, up 11.8% and 15.6% respectively, but neither crossed an anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 52 incidents — about 56% below the 118 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 5 incidents — about 82% below the 27 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 86 incidents — about 58% below the 206 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 142, down 38% from 228 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 52, down 41% from 88 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 Russian Hill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Noe Valley
53 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Russian Hill's 52.
Open page →Visitacion Valley
50 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Russian Hill's 52.
Open page →Haight Ashbury
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Russian Hill's 52.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Russian 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.