Name: How the pandemic changed crime in every San Francisco neighborhood
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How the pandemic changed crime in every San Francisco neighborhood

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San Francisco’s crime rates looked very different in 2020 than they did in previous years — largely because of the pandemic.Most types of , and while homicides increased slightly, they remained lower than almost any year since the 1960s. Property crimes were all over the map: Burglaries and motor vehicle thefts soared, while larceny thefts decreased.A closer look at the data shows that crime fluctuations San Franciscans experienced last year strongly depended on where they lived in the city. On the whole, wealthier neighborhoods saw sharper spikes in crimes that rose citywide and shallower downturns in the crimes that fell.The Chronicle analyzed filed with the San Francisco Police Department since 2018. The data set does not contain crimes involving juveniles and many crimes involving the special victims unit.We then mapped the reports to see how crime rates changed in every S.F. neighborhood from 2019 to 2020. The analysis examined five types of crime: assaults, burglaries, larceny thefts, motor vehicle thefts and robberies. Certain serious crimes, such as homicides and rapes, were not common enough to analyze by neighborhood.Overall, we found that most neighborhoods saw decreased rates of assaults, robberies and larceny thefts.On the other hand, every neighborhood saw an uptick in motor vehicle theft last year except for the Financial District. This decrease is probably explained by the fact that the Financial District lost most of its bustle last year: The neighborhood saw move out from March to November 2020 than over the same period in 2019, and had far fewer workers commuting in.Burglaries also spiked in most neighborhoods in the pandemic’s first year. The increase in residential burglaries in San Francisco is unique in the state, according to Magnus Lofstrom, a policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “ are supported by the data,” Lofstrom said.The data shows the burglary spike is concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods. The Marina, Pacific Heights and Haight-Ashbury — all neighborhoods with median household incomes over $150,000 — saw burglaries increase by 83%, 93% and 150%, respectively.Meanwhile, neighborhoods with lower incomes tended to see burglaries increase less sharply. And in the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and Lakeshore, all of which have median household incomes of $70,000 or below, burglaries actually decreased. The strong relationship we observed between increases in the burglary rate and household incomes from 2019 to 2020 didn’t occur from 2018 to 2019, so appears to be a new trend.The connection between wealth and increased burglaries last year makes sense given the pandemic’s economic repercussions, according to Lofstrom.Research “does not find any relationship between unemployment and violent crime,” he said. “But it does find that at a time of, say, an increase in unemployment that property crimes go up.”Take pre-pandemic San Francisco, which had the of any city in California. Add the recession of 2020 — which has had a dramatic impact on lower-income people while largely sparing () wealthier ones — and it makes sense that property crimes spiked in wealthy neighborhoods, Lofstrom said.“If there’s going to be increases in property crime, where might they take place? They’ll be taking place in areas where it actually pays off to commit these property crimes,” Lofstrom said. “When we have these increases in disparity, (these neighborhoods) become increasingly good targets.”Most burglaries in San Francisco never get solved: What police call the clearance rate — the percentage of arrests per reported crime — , and is under 10% so far this year.There was also a strong pandemic-era relationship between a neighborhood’s affluence and the change in the number of larceny thefts — lower-income areas had the sharpest decreases, while higher-income areas had lesser declines, though most still saw decreases. Neighborhood incomes had a weaker relationship to robbery and assault rates: Those mostly decreased across the board, but lower-income neighborhoods were slightly more likely to see larger decreases.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.Crime DataOn the other hand, motor vehicle thefts actually increased slightly more in lower-income neighborhoods, though the relationship was not pronounced.Lenore Anderson, chief executive and president of the criminal justice reform organization Californians for Safety and Justice, that crime rates are largely determined by environmental factors like mental health, substance abuse and economic declines.“Criminologists and researchers will point to a variety of factors when we think about crime trends,” Anderson said. Aside from policing initiatives, “none of the factors they typically point to have anything to do with criminal justice policy.”That includes the election of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whom some San Franciscans have blamed for the spike in burglaries. Boudin’s tenure as D.A. probably has little to do with the surge, according to Anderson.“I think that there’s a way in which the debate on crime policy gets so politicized so quick around individual elected officials or individual cases, when the truth is, there’s a much bigger gap that exists, which is the lack of attention paid to real crime prevention in the first place,” she previously told The Chronicle.Methodology: The FBI currently aggregates crime counts from law enforcement agencies nationwide using the (UCR) standard. The UCR standard counts crimes according to the hierarchy rule, where if an incident occurs with multiple charges only the most serious is counted. Our analysis counts crimes individually to better align with the FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, which will soon replace the UCR standard nationwide. This means that the same incident could be counted multiple times if there are multiple crimes associated with it. For example, an incident involving an assault and a larceny theft would count as both. Over 90% of incidents do not involve multiple crimes. We also counted both simple and aggravated assaults, while the SFPD counts only the latter on its data dashboard. The FBI defines simple assaults as assaults that “do not involve the use of a firearm, knife or cutting instrument, or other dangerous weapon, and in which the victim did not sustain serious or aggravated injuries.”Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer, and Nami Sumida is a Chronicle data visualization developer. Email: , Twitter: ,Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

San Francisco’s crime rates looked very different in 2020 than they did in previous years — largely because of the pandemic.Most types of , and while homicides increased slightly, they remained lower than almost any year since the 1960s. Property crimes were all over the map: Burglaries and motor vehicle thefts soared, while larceny thefts decreased.A closer look at the data shows that crime fluctuations San Franciscans experienced last year strongly depended on where they lived in the city. On the whole, wealthier neighborhoods saw sharper spikes in crimes that rose citywide and shallower...

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Susie Neilson

Nami Sumida

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How the pandemic changed crime in every San Francisco neighborhood

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