Stop counts vary sharply across the city’s police districts: a few areas account for a disproportionate share of observations, while others register far fewer. The table and maps below summarize that imbalance using the district letter codes recorded in the dataset, aligned to SFPD boundary geography where possible.
Spatial clustering matters for how we read these numbers—enforcement intensity follows corridors and neighborhoods rather than a uniform grid. The patterns here are descriptive; they highlight where stops concentrate, not why those concentrations occur.
| Rank | Code | District Name | Total Stops | % of All Stops | Relative Volume |
|---|
Stop counts are heavily skewed toward a few districts: Ingleside, Taraval, and Southern each account for a large share of stops (well above most others), while several districts fall under roughly 5%. That imbalance means enforcement intensity is concentrated in specific corridors rather than spread evenly across the city.
In the scatter plot, each point represents an aggregated location, where the number of stops occur at the same coordinates is encoded visually. Higher counts appear as darker, larger, and more opaque circles, scaled relative to the maximum value in the dataset.
Although several northeastern districts do not have the highest total number of traffic stops, many stops occur at the same coordinates, making this area appear the most densely clustered on the map. In contrast, Ingleside—despite having the highest total stops—is less prominent, indicating that its stops are spread across multiple locations rather than concentrated.
The higher density in northeastern districts is driven by concentrated urban activity, dense street networks, and repeated enforcement at key intersections. In contrast, southern and southwestern districts exhibit a more dispersed pattern, where stops are primarily aligned with major arterial roads rather than concentrated at specific locations.