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.
September 2026 was a single-signal month for the Tenderloin. Across nine tracked categories, only one moved far enough to register: robbery ran below its multi-year trend. Every other category, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, theft from vehicle, and the rest, stayed within range.
Robbery's 12-month total sits at 226, down from 296 the prior year, a 23.6% decline. Theft from vehicle shows a similar trajectory over the trailing 12 months, down 24.0% to 193 incidents from 254. The broader picture is a neighborhood where most property and violent crime categories are running below their prior-year levels, with robbery the single strongest move this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 226 incidents — about 37% below the 357 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 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
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below Tenderloin's 226.
Open page →Mission
266 incidents over the past 12 months — 40 above Tenderloin's 226.
Open page →Bayview Hunters Point
97 incidents over the past 12 months — 129 below Tenderloin's 226.
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.