South of Market Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
South of Market — universally called SoMa — is the formerly industrial district south of Market Street, transformed since the 1990s into a dense mix of tech offices, condos, museums (including SFMOMA), and the convention space at Moscone Center. It carries a 24-hour rhythm distinct from the rest of the city, with nightlife clusters, the Caltrain terminus, and an uneven mix of long-time residents, single-room-occupancy hotels, and new-build towers.
Four signals surfaced in South of Market this September, split evenly between one-month below-trend moves and structural sustained shifts. Two categories, vandalism and burglary, ran below their recent levels in a single-month drop. Burglary also registered as a sustained shift, meaning the decline is multi-month, not just a quiet September. The overall shape is a narrowing property crime footprint, with the longer-term compression in burglary the clearest structural story.
Burglary is down 33.2% over the trailing 12 months, 245 incidents against 367 in the prior year, and the sustained-shift signal reinforces that this is not noise. Vandalism follows a similar arc, off 19.7% year-over-year at 468 incidents vs. 583. Outside property crime, the picture is mixed: theft from vehicle is down 38.5% on a 12-month basis, while other larceny is up 9.6% and sexual assault has risen from 10 to 15 incidents year-over-year. Everything else remained within expected range.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 468 incidents — about 34% below the 711 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 245 incidents — about 52% below the 515 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 323, down 39% from 525 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 245, down 33% from 367 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
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 South of Market compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Tenderloin
503 incidents over the past 12 months — 35 above South of Market's 468.
Open page →Bayview Hunters Point
414 incidents over the past 12 months — 54 below South of Market's 468.
Open page →Financial District/South Beach
295 incidents over the past 12 months — 173 below South of Market's 468.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for South of Market, 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.