Addressing Crime in San Francisco

San Francisco has one of the highest property-crime rates of any major U.S. city — roughly 67 incidents per 1,000 residents, and ranked #1 nationally for property crime. Our team was tasked with one question: where, when, and what kind of crime is happening — so the city can put limited enforcement and prevention dollars where they actually move the needle.

I worked as one of five analysts. I helped frame the guiding questions (where / what / when / resolution status), wrote SQL to extract and clean the raw incident feed, ran statistical analysis in Python to surface patterns, and built Tableau views to make the findings legible to non-technical decision-makers. The charts below are from our actual Tableau workbook.

Where. Incidents cluster hard in the northeast — Mission, Tenderloin, and the Financial District carry the load. Treasure Island and Seacliff are near-empty by comparison.

When. Mission leads every month; counts rise from summer into fall and spike around major holidays.

Outcome. Across every district, open/unresolved cases (purple) outnumber resolved ones — crime is reported faster than it's cleared.

• Larceny theft is the dominant crime — roughly 3× the next category, and over half of it is theft from vehicles. In SF, the odds of a car break-in run about 1 in 127.
• Hotspots are ~56.7× denser than the safest areas. Mission and Tenderloin versus Treasure Island and Seacliff — a gap driven by population density and socioeconomic pressure.
• Timing is predictable. Crime spikes at noon, 2pm, 6pm, and midnight; Fridays and Saturdays run hottest; summer-into-fall is the peak season.
• Most cases stay open. Open/active cases are the majority in every police district — the clearest signal that investigative capacity isn't keeping pace.

Data: SFPD Incident Reports (2018), DataSF · Census Reporter · FBI UCR. Read as direction, not precision — single-year sample.