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 April — four ran below trend in a single month, three registered as sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is a broad, multi-category decline across both property crime and violent crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Vandalism, robbery, and motor vehicle theft all came in below trend this month. Vandalism's trailing 12 months stand at 181 incidents against a prior-year total of 220, down 17.7%. Motor vehicle theft shows the sharpest 12-month move: 129 incidents versus 225 in the prior year, down 42.7%. Burglary and theft from vehicle — the neighborhood's two highest-volume categories — are both down more than 28% against the prior 12 months, and those structural declines appear in the sustained-shift count rather than the single-month drops, indicating the compression has been building across multiple months.
Notable signals 4
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 181 incidents — about 34% below the 274 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 32 incidents — about 40% below the 53 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 129 incidents — about 59% below the 315 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 294 incidents — about 54% below the 643 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 43% from 225 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 157, down 38% from 254 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 294, down 29% from 413 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 April 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.”
Hayes Valley
172 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Sunset/Parkside's 181.
Open page →Nob Hill
203 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 above Sunset/Parkside's 181.
Open page →Castro/Upper Market
147 incidents over the past 12 months — 34 below Sunset/Parkside's 181.
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.