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 August, two one-month below-trend signals and one structural sustained shift. The overall shape is downward across both violent and property crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Aggravated assault and vandalism both ran below trend this month. Aggravated assault is the sharper of the two: the trailing 12-month total is 4 incidents against 16 in the prior year, a 75.0% drop that reflects a category running well below its recent pace. Theft from vehicle is the sustained shift, 129 incidents over the current 12 months against 193 the year before, a 33.2% structural decline that has held across multiple months.
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 79 incidents — about 61% below the 203 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 129, down 33% from 193 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 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 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
4 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Russian Hill's 4.
Open page →McLaren Park
5 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Russian Hill's 4.
Open page →Treasure Island
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.