About crimes
Summary
This section of EveryBlock publishes all crimes reported recently by the San Francisco Police Department.
Where we get the data
The data is retrieved from CrimeMAPS, the crime mapping Web site of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).
Due to the way the CrimeMAPS system delivers crime reports, locations for crime incident data on EveryBlock are available only to the ZIP code level. We're working on a method for determining smaller, more specific area ranges for incidents based on the existing CrimeMAPS system, and we have put in multiple requests with SFPD for block-level, incident-level crime data.
How often we get the data
The police enter new reports each day, and EveryBlock retrieves the data daily.
However, it takes a couple weeks for crimes to show up in San Francisco's CrimeMAPS system, which means they are delayed for EveryBlock. For more, see below.
About crimes in general
To report crime in San Francisco, dial 911.
This data comes from police incident reports written by San Francisco police officers.
When officers write an incident report, they may include one or more offenses that occurred during the incident. For reports containing more than one offense, there is always a primary offense. For example, if the incident report contains a robbery and an assault, the robbery will be designated the primary offense, because robbery is the more serious offense. For simplicity and to avoid duplicate counts of reports, this data contains only the primary offense for each incident.
The police department receives 350 reports a day.
It can take a couple weeks from the time of an incident for the record to show up on CrimeMAPS and then on EveryBlock. This happens because residents don't always report incidents immediately. It also occurs because police reports must be entered into computers by clerks, a process affected by staffing.
A new records management system is being implemented that will significantly reduce these delays, according to the department.
CrimeMAPS is part of a larger system available to each district station. It allows SFPD officers to create maps and reports of crimes with more detail and for longer periods than the public CrimeMaps system. See the SFPD Web site for information on District Police Stations. Crime statistics, organized by district, for the years 2001-2003 and 2005-2006 are available here on the SFPD Web site. For more information on crime classification codes, see the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). See the UCR Handbook (PDF) for a complete listing and explanation of crime types.