San Francisco Crime Rate — 2025 in Review
A year of crime trends, summarized.
An annual companion to the monthly briefings: the anomalies that mattered, the structural shifts that emerged, and where the model got it right (or wrong). 12 briefings, condensed.
Seven chapters
The big picture
Citywide totals + monthly volume for 2025.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies that defined the year.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2025 totals.
Crime by neighborhood
Neighborhoods sorted by total tracked signals.
Crime forecast scorecard
Month-by-month forecast accuracy against actuals.
Methodology updates
Threshold + bucket changes that landed during the year.
What we'll watch in 2026
Patterns we expect to keep moving.
The big picture
San Francisco closed 2025 with 40,144 bucketed incidents — down 25.2% against 53,677 the year before. 1,980 tracked signals were raised across 12 briefings — 26 spikes, 1755 drops + sustained shifts, and 19 rare-event / streak-break signals.
The monthly volume chart at right shows where the year was busy and where it was quiet, against the prior-year monthly average (dashed line). The categories that moved most are broken out below.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies we'd point a 2025reader to. Recurring (neighborhood, category) stories collapse to one card so the list isn't five copies of the same spike.
Bernal Heights · Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 434 incidents — about 75% above the 248 average from prior years.
Noe Valley · Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 360 incidents — about 111% above the 171 average from prior years.
Hayes Valley · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 177 incidents — about 39% below the 292 average from prior years.
Russian Hill · Robbery
The past 12 months saw 10 incidents — about 79% below the 47 average from prior years.
Portola · Burglary
The past 12 months saw 22 incidents — about 67% below the 66 average from prior years.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2025 total volume.
Crime by neighborhood
12 neighborhoods led the year by total signal count. The note column is the dominant story for that neighborhood — its biggest single signal.
Crime forecast scorecard
Of 120 monthly point-estimate forecasts issued for 2025, 91 (76%) landed inside their 95% prediction intervals. Below: month by month.
Per-bucket coverage, MAPE, and bias details live on the methodology page.
Methodology updates
Logged inline with the code that runs the model.
- VIEW DETAIL →
10-bucket NIBRS-aligned categories
Replaced an earlier 6-bucket scheme (which collapsed homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault into one “violent” bucket). Each bucket now maps to FBI UCR Part 1 / NIBRS Group A — the cross-city common denominator for adding new cities.
- VIEW DETAIL →
Sustained-shift Poisson rate-ratio test
Added a Poisson Z-test (|Z|>2.576, ratio differs by ≥25%) for sustained shifts between recent vs prior 12-mo windows — distinct from the spike/drop signals which compare against the multi-year baseline.
- VIEW DETAIL →
Prophet forecasts with low-count gating
Per-(neighborhood, bucket) forecasts now skip cells averaging <2 incidents/month over the trailing 24 months. Violent-bucket forecasts skip at the neighborhood level and surface via rare-event / streak-break signals instead.
What we'll watch in 2026
3 distinct patterns from 2025we expect to keep moving — drawn from the year's recurring sustained signals, not the single-month spikes already covered above.
- 01
Golden Gate Park · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 36 incidents — about 68% below the 112 average from prior years. Surfaced in 12 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 02
Marina · theft from vehicle
The past 12 months saw 295 incidents — about 75% below the 1178 average from prior years. Surfaced in 9 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 03
Sunset/Parkside · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 189 incidents — about 32% below the 277 average from prior years. Surfaced in 5 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
Cite as: Public Analyst.ai, “San Francisco — 2025in review,” auto-generated annual report. Permanent URL: /san-francisco/2025/year-in-review.