San Francisco commercial burglary statistics show one of the sharpest declines of any major American city. In the first half of 2025, San Francisco’s non-residential burglary rate ran 34 percent below the same period in 2024 — against an average decline of 18 percent across the 18 comparison cities in the same national analysis.
The city is also below where it was before the pandemic. San Francisco’s first-half non-residential burglary rate in 2025 sat 31 percent under its 2019 level, while the comparison cities collectively were flat against 2019.
The citywide picture
Burglary of all types fell 12.5 percent in 2025, to 3,673 reported cases. The wider property crime numbers moved the same way: motor vehicle theft dropped 24 percent to 3,011 incidents, and larceny theft — the city’s largest crime category by volume, driven heavily by vehicle break-ins — fell 21.8 percent to 16,492.
Residential burglary declined too, but far less steeply: down 9 percent in the first half of 2025 against the same period in 2024. The gap between that and the 34 percent drop in non-residential burglary is the most interesting thing in the data — whatever changed in San Francisco changed commercial burglary considerably more than residential.
What San Francisco publishes, and what it doesn’t
SFPD maintains a public Crime Dashboard covering all Part I offences under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting definitions, with year-to-year comparison. What it reports is incident counts by UCR category — burglary as a single Part I offence.
The residential and non-residential split reported on this page comes from rate-based analysis published by the Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks the two separately in six-month intervals across a set of US cities. That’s the reason the figures above are expressed as rates and percentage changes rather than an absolute annual commercial burglary count: no such standalone count is published in the city’s own summary reporting.
Anyone quoting a precise “San Francisco commercial burglary” total for a full year is reconstructing it, not citing it.
Why the decline is unusually steep
SFPD attributes part of the change to enforcement technology and targeted operations — license plate readers, drone deployment, and bait-car programmes aimed at the smash-and-grab crews behind the city’s vehicle break-in problem, alongside concentrated enforcement in specific corridors. Those are the department’s stated reasons rather than independently established causes, and the same period saw declines across most US cities, so some share of the change is a national trend rather than anything specific to San Francisco.
What’s harder to argue with is the size of the gap. A 34 percent year-over-year drop against an 18 percent average across comparison cities is a genuine outlier, not noise.
What hasn’t improved
Two things run against the trend. Shoplifting rose roughly 20 percent in the first half of 2025 compared with 2019 — consistent with the statewide pattern, where shoplifting is the one property crime category still climbing while burglary falls. Our statewide commercial burglary analysis covers that divergence.
Catalytic converter theft has also shown signs of returning across parts of the Bay Area in early 2026, tracking the price of the precious metals involved rather than local enforcement.
What a falling rate does and doesn’t mean for a business
A 34 percent decline changes the odds; it doesn’t change the shape of the risk. Commercial burglary remains an after-hours crime against premises with nobody in them — the pattern holds in every Bay Area city we’ve analysed, including Oakland, where commercial burglary fell 43 percent in a year, and Fremont.
The practical consequence is unchanged: the businesses that get hit are the ones that sit dark and unwatched, and a citywide percentage offers no protection to a specific building on a specific night.
Where Guardian fits
Guardian Integrated Security covers San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. Monitoring agents watch a property’s existing cameras live, challenge intruders over on-site speakers, dispatch Guardian’s own patrol, and alert and coordinate with police using a verified account of a crime in progress — which matters increasingly, as a growing number of California cities require verified response before dispatching to an alarm.
On-site guard coverage is available for properties that need staffed presence. Every property starts with a free on-site assessment. Call (800) 400-3167.
Sources
Non-residential and residential burglary rate changes are drawn from the Council on Criminal Justice’s analysis of San Francisco crime trends, which tracks the two categories separately in six-month intervals. Citywide 2025 burglary, motor vehicle theft and larceny counts come from SFPD year-end reporting as covered in local press. Part I offence definitions and year-to-year comparisons come from the SFPD Crime Dashboard.
