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.
Three categories moved in Russian Hill this September, two single-month below-trend signals and one longer structural shift. The shape of the month is broadly downward: aggravated assault and vandalism both ran below trend in the current period, and theft from vehicle has settled into a multi-year structural decline rather than just a quiet month.
Aggravated assault is the strongest signal, 4 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 13 in the prior year, a 69.2% year-over-year reduction. Vandalism is down 25.7% over the same comparison, 75 incidents vs 101. Theft from vehicle shows the same direction at a structural level, 117 incidents in the current 12 months against 184 the year before, a 36.4% decrease that has persisted long enough to register as a sustained shift rather than a one-month dip. Everything else in the neighborhood, burglary, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, and robbery, was within the range of normal variation this month.
Notable signals 2
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 4 incidents — about 85% below the 27 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 75 incidents — about 63% below the 202 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 117, down 36% from 184 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 September 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 aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Glen Park
3 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Russian Hill's 4.
Open page →Golden Gate Park
5 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Russian Hill's 4.
Open page →Japantown
5 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Russian Hill's 4.
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.