Western Addition Crime Rate Trends — San Francisco
The Western Addition is a residential neighborhood west of City Hall whose history is inseparable from the Fillmore jazz era and the postwar urban-renewal projects that displaced thousands of its residents. Today it remains a culturally significant district, with Alamo Square's Painted Ladies, historic places of worship, and an evolving mix of long-standing and newer residents.
Seven signals surfaced in Western Addition this June — three one-month below-trend reads and four sustained structural shifts. The structural pattern is broadly downward across property and violent crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Vandalism, robbery, and motor vehicle theft all ran below trend on a single-month basis. The 12-month picture reinforces that direction: theft from vehicle is down 46.1% against the prior year (230 incidents vs. 427), vandalism is down 32.3% (193 vs. 285), and robbery is down 28.6% (50 vs. 70). Four of the seven signals are sustained shifts, meaning the decline isn't concentrated in one noisy month — it reflects a structural move across the trailing two years.
Notable signals 3
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 193 incidents — about 37% below the 307 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 50 incidents — about 53% below the 106 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 124 incidents — about 45% below the 227 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 230, down 46% from 427 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 344, down 28% from 480 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 193, down 32% from 285 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 124, down 29% from 174 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 June 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 Western Addition 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.”
Sunset/Parkside
182 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 below Western Addition's 193.
Open page →Nob Hill
169 incidents over the past 12 months — 24 below Western Addition's 193.
Open page →Hayes Valley
156 incidents over the past 12 months — 37 below Western Addition's 193.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Western Addition, 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.