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.
Two tracked signals moved in the Tenderloin this April — one single-month below-trend reading in robbery and one structural, multi-month shift in motor vehicle theft. The breadth is narrow, but both signals point in the same direction: downward.
Robbery's 12-month total stands at 244, down 15.0% against the prior year's 287 and running well below the multi-year baseline. Motor vehicle theft is the more durable story — 254 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 367 the year before, a -30.8% shift that the sustained-shift signal classifies as structural rather than a single quiet month. Every other tracked category was within its normal range.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 244 incidents — about 32% below the 361 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 254, down 31% 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 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
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
221 incidents over the past 12 months — 23 below Tenderloin's 244.
Open page →Mission
308 incidents over the past 12 months — 64 above Tenderloin's 244.
Open page →Bayview Hunters Point
112 incidents over the past 12 months — 132 below Tenderloin's 244.
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 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.