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.
Six categories moved in Sunset/Parkside in March 2026, all in the same direction — four ran below their single-month trend and two registered as longer-term sustained shifts. There are no spikes, no rare events, no streak breaks. The structural pattern is broadly downward across property and violent crime alike.
Vandalism leads the signal list, with current 12-month volume at 191 incidents against a baseline mean of 274.41 — down 13.6% year-over-year. Robbery and motor vehicle theft are also below trend this month; motor vehicle theft shows the sharpest 12-month move in the neighborhood, 129 incidents against 242 in the prior year, a 46.7% reduction. Burglary follows a similar trajectory at down 35.4% over the same window. Everything else tracked this month came in within normal range.
Notable signals 4
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 191 incidents — about 30% below the 274 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 31 incidents — about 42% below the 53 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 129 incidents — about 59% below the 316 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 320 incidents — about 50% below the 646 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 129, down 47% from 242 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 166, down 35% from 257 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 March 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 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.”
Nob Hill
199 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Sunset/Parkside's 191.
Open page →Hayes Valley
169 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below Sunset/Parkside's 191.
Open page →Western Addition
225 incidents over the past 12 months — 34 above Sunset/Parkside's 191.
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, 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.