How to Tell You’re in a Safe SF Neighborhood

I hate to say it, but the title of this post is kinda of misleading.  It’s actually a bit of a trick question. 

Why?

Well, everyone has a different idea of what makes a neighborhood “safe.”  Frankly, each person has a different tolerance to risk. 

I live in the Outer Sunset where we seem have a higher than average amount of auto break-ins and thefts and grafitti tends to be fairly common (my fence AND my garbage can got tagged recently AND I chased down two teens I saw tagging on EVERYTHING they saw on the street) but I still tend to consider it a “safe” neighborhood.  Other neighborhoods have higher rates of drug dealing or prostitution.  Others, still, have a high rate of murders and homicides.   Others still have gang violence. 

San Francisco is diverse, and if you’re thinking about buying real estate here, you really need to examine YOUR tolerances. 

What YOU consider to be a safe neighborhood depends primarily on your personal aversion to risk.  Your standard of safety is not necessarily my standard of safety.  (Though I’d be so bold as to go out on a limb and say that most people feel less safe in areas with high murder rates, just sayin’.)

But that doesn’t mean that you need to jeopardize your safety by wandering the streets at night looking for crime. 

To find out about crime in SF, you need only look as far as your computer!

You can easily find statistics about San Francisco crime by pointing, clicking and filling out some parameters. 

CrimeMapping.com, according to their site, ”is a site developed by The Omega Group to help law enforcement agencies throughout North America provide the public with valuable information about recent crime activity in their neighborhood. Our goal is to assist police departments in reducing crime through a better-informed citizenry. Creating more self-reliance among community members is a great benefit to community oriented policing efforts everywhere and has been proven effective in combating crime.”

CrimeReports.com claims to be the world leader in online crime mapping, with over 600 law enforcement partners across North America. It also features sex offender data and allows you to create email alerts about crime in a specific area.

SF Crime Maps is a site that’s hosted by our very own sfgov.org.  To use the site, check out the various FAQ’s and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “I Agree.”  From there, click the crimes you want to search for (you’ll notice homicides are conspicuously missing from the list!) and select the area parameters.  You can search up to the last 90 days. 

San Francisco Crime Blog picks up where SF Crime Maps leaves off.  The SF Crime Blog covers a variety of crimes in the blog section but really focuses on the murders that have occurred in SF.  In addition to a countdown of the homicides that have occurred, you’ll find a map that details those homicides for 2007 and 2008. *While I liked the format of this blog, a little birdie dropped a note in the comments that informed me of some potential copyright type issues surrounding the blog, and since I HATE it when people copy my content and put it all over the internet (y’all know who you are), I removed the link.*

Once you have access to statistics, you can make your own decisions whether the neighborhood you want to live in is safe enough for you.