Sunset/Parkside Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Sunset and adjoining Parkside form San Francisco's largest residential district by area, a foggy western expanse of low-rise single-family homes that runs from Golden Gate Park to the Pacific. The combined area has a quieter, family-oriented pace, and its own commercial corridors along Irving, Noriega, and Taraval Streets.
Seven categories moved in Sunset/Parkside this August, all of them downward. Four registered as single-month below-trend signals and three as sustained structural shifts, meaning the declines in those categories have persisted across multiple months, not just a quiet August. The overall shape is a broad, cross-category pullback in property and violent crime.
Robbery is the strongest signal: 22 incidents in the current 12 months against 39 in the prior 12, a 43.6% reduction. Theft from vehicle and burglary are not far behind, down 48.1% and 45.4% respectively over the same window. Vandalism also ran below trend this month, though its 12-month total of 184 is only marginally off last year's 189. The remaining categories, including aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft, all sit below their prior-year levels as well, with nothing in the tracked data running above its usual range.
Notable signals 4
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 22 incidents — about 58% below the 53 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 184 incidents — about 32% below the 271 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 215 incidents — about 66% below the 632 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 109 incidents — about 65% below the 310 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 215, down 48% from 414 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 113, down 45% from 207 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 109, down 44% from 195 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 Sunset/Parkside 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.”
Russian Hill
21 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sunset/Parkside's 22.
Open page →Lone Mountain/USF
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Sunset/Parkside's 22.
Open page →Visitacion Valley
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Sunset/Parkside's 22.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sunset/Parkside, 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.