Tenderloin Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Tenderloin is a dense, downtown neighborhood west of Union Square, historically home to single-room-occupancy hotels and a long-running concentration of poverty, homelessness, and street drug markets. It also carries a cultural legacy of jazz, theater, and LGBTQ+ history that predates much of the rest of the city's downtown — including the Little Saigon stretch along Larkin Street.
Three categories moved in Tenderloin this March — one one-month below-trend signal and two structural, multi-month sustained shifts. The overall shape is downward across property crime and robbery, with no spikes and nothing running above trend this month.
Robbery is the sharpest single-month signal, running below trend against a 12-month total of 242 incidents vs a prior-year 302 — down 19.9%. The two sustained shifts reinforce a longer structural story: theft from vehicle is down 27.8% over the trailing 12 months (223 vs 309), and motor vehicle theft is down 32.4% (253 vs 374). Arson is the one counter-trend in the 12-month data — 41 incidents against a prior-year 32, up 28.1% — though it did not register among the three signals this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 242 incidents — about 33% below the 362 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 253, down 32% from 374 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 223, down 28% from 309 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
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 Tenderloin 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.”
South of Market
220 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below Tenderloin's 242.
Open page →Mission
305 incidents over the past 12 months — 63 above Tenderloin's 242.
Open page →Bayview Hunters Point
123 incidents over the past 12 months — 119 below Tenderloin's 242.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Tenderloin, 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.