While not nearly as exciting as receiving top honors as the best city for tourists to walk slow on city sidewalks, or best city in which singles can hump, on Monday the FBI just awarded SF as the city with the largest reported number of hate crimes in 2006. According to Bay City News (via SF Crime): With a population of approximately 746,000, had a total of 94 reported hate crime incidents in 2006,......

More vigilantes? A shooting yesterday afternoon in the Loin may have been an attempt to clean up the neighborhood. At around noon yesterday, authorities found a man with non-life threatening wounds after hearing reports of one shot being fired. The shooter was arrested a few hours later, after what the report called an "intense" building search. Witnesses say the shooter was acting as an armed vigilante of some sort, but the cops won't comment about......

Well, okay, this isn't really a crime movie, but if an octopus really did attack San Francisco, heck yeah it would make the Blotter! The cops think a robbery in the Richmond's Ocean King restaurant on Tuesday (glad Gourmet de l'Ouest wasn't there when it happened!) may be linked to a robbery in Oakland at the Korean Bistro. Both restaurants were hit by a multiethnic trio of robbers (two African-American, one speaking with an obvious Vietnamese accent). Despite what you see in the movies, multiracial gangs are actually fairly rare, which made the cops think the robberies were linked. We can't decide if it's depressing, typical, or a good sign that criminals can't transcend race. The gun battle on Tuesday at 18th and South Van Ness outside a tire-rim store, which injured four people (one of whom was a bystander), has been traced back to two Western Addition gangs whose members happened to cross paths outside their usual area. The Mission gang force is annoyed. "In the Mission District we have problems with our own gangs. We don't need gangs from other areas coming to visit us," he told the Ex. And Oakland's coming back strong in the 2005 murder count, after a surge forward by perennial second-placer San Francisco, with three killings yesterday and two today. Oakland's total is now at 13 murders for 2005, and San Francisco is at 16 as of last week. Hey, there's a Blotter special today too -- since you've asked, there's a list of all the pictures we've used as Blotter illustrations since we started, after the jump....

You know how on Murder She Wrote, you were always like, why does anyone ever invite Jessica Fletcher anywhere, because someone always gets murdered when she's around? Well, Jessica Fletcher must be in San Francisco, because there's been four separate murders this week. On Thursday, two people were killed in the Alamo Square area (one at McAllister and Lyon, and another at Eddy and Scott), and over the weekend, two people were killed in the Potrero Hill area (one at 20th and Tennessee, another at 22nd and Vermont). In our own Casuistry incident, three teens in Pleasanton have been arrested for murdering a cat and hanging its body from a noose over a train trestle for passersby to see. Who comes up with ideas like this? And Oakland's going with humili-tainment as its latest get-tough-on-prostitution tactic. The Oakland PD will be installing cameras in areas known for prostitution and johns who are arrested for solicitation may have their pictures put up on billboards and bus stops. Dang! Adding insult to injury, they'll also take your car ("Come to Oakland in a Porsche, leave on AC Transit"), so there's that additional risk of waiting for a bus stop that has your picture on it. Oakland's not messing around....

A truculent teenage girl threatening to kill herself after a fight with a relative was rescued from the Redwood Shores swamp after she stormed onto a small island in the marsh and refused to come in. The authorites were unable to follow her footprints to the island because the mud would not support an adult's weight. She was finally picked up by an air boat. Keep an eye out above on your way to Target -- the rain has caused a cliff collapse on Avalon Canyon, and a 75-foot tree fall on a Colma home. And Oakland's new interim police chief is looking to reduce homicides by almost 1/3 for this year (from 88 in 2004 to 60 in 2005) as part of his plan to reduce crime in general. His conclusion -- it all comes down to narcotics enforcement. ...

In response to reader feedback, we're trying out new graphics for the blotter. Let us know what you think! Halloween came and went with a minimum of fuss in the city -- as one officer noted, there were 250,000 people and only five punches thrown (working out to a ratio of one punch per 50,000 folks). One of those punches was thrown around 10:30 p.m. at Market and Castro, where a man complained that someone......