Well, the bad news is still that we've hit a 12 year high for homicides in the City and County of San Francisco, with two weeks left to go in the year. On the statistical side, though, the SFPD year to date murder count has moved down by three victims, from 100 to 97. What happened to those three victims? Well, they're not any less dead, unfortunately. Rather, three of them were reclassified into non-murders.......

Attention citizenry! The SFPD needs your help. Especially if you're a web designer. They're currently conducting a poll, with the help of a Massachusetts company called, ominously, the Public Safety Strategies Group. Do you like foot patrols? Do you know where your police station is? Have you been the victim of a crime lately? These and other exciting questions will be answered on tonight's episode of "The San Francisco Police Effectiveness Review"! Sadly, the......

Some very sad news. According to Bay City News, "[t]wo men among the midday shoppers" smashed the storefront window at Gucci (Union Square) and stole an undisclosed amount of jewelry. No one has yet to be arrested for the luxury-store violation. During midday? Really? Wow. Were they super villains? Because how else did they evade capture in the afternoon light? Someone at Burning Man is found and arrested for flicking their Bic during a......

It's now been ten days since C.W. Nevius went off on the Gav for letting people camp in Golden Gate Park. Things shook out pretty much as you'd expect: follow-up articles , reactions from the Supes, letters to the Editor, promises from the Mayor, frothy commentary here on SFist, and a new issue du jour: what to do with all of the used heroin needles that turn up everywhere? The Chron article explores two possible......

The SFPD arrested the guy who murdered the anti-crime activist in the Haight, Joe Konopka, in an S&M session gone wrong. They believe Konopka, who was found handcuffed, choked to death on plastic covering his face. After Konopka died, the murderer took his laptop, jewelry, and cell phone before fleeing the scene. Does anyone know what happened at 16th and South Van Ness Wednesday night? We walked by there around 9 p.m. and there were......

--Doesn't that MUNI car look gorgeous? [Picture by DottieBoBottie from the SFist Flickr stream.] --No fireworks in Oakland this July 4. [Chron] --Enigmatic rock-tosser and Democratic presidential contender Mike Gravel was at Pride this weekend. [1115, via a tipster at Planet Out.] --The SFPD wants a raise. [ABC 7.] --Why aren't Oakland city politics as entertaining as SF? [Trib.] --Lotsa people on BART last Sunday [BART website.] --New dogs patiently waiting at parking meters!......

Well, that was a grim Daily Californian homepage yesterday. The top six stories: pedestrian hit by car on Telegraph; Berkeley summer camp evacuated due to Tahoe fire, body found near the Berkeley Marina, beloved local activist hit by train, Cal student to be tried for killing David Halberstam, and memorials for the local murder-suicide family. On the bright side, the other article on the home page is that Cal basketball star DeVon Hardin has decided......

This story's so weird that we're not even saving it for tomorrow's Blotter! (We'll be cursing this decision as we frantically try to find a third Blotter item later tonight.) Mark Pope, the guy who co-founded Quark Software, was working in his Pac Heights mansion last week when he heard some weird noises and looked out the window and saw a car (a red BMW convertible) that was exactly the same as his, only in......

--Gavin Newsom had another Project Homeless Connect event. Reader Elihuh2001 sends along this picture, along with the note that Gavin refused the free coffee provided, in favor of a more corporate flair. --A Pirates of the Caribbean ship sails through Oakland. --San Francisco comic artist Justin Hall gives a superhero lecture at ToonFetish, a conference in Hollywood which SFist MattyMatt assures us is about exactly what it sounds like it's about. --Gay bomb, gay bomb,......

A gay African-American high school English teacher at the private Urban School is recovering from three stab wounds he received a few weeks ago while eating at the Taqueria Cancun down near Mission and 29th Street. A woman came into the taqueria and started yelling racial and anti-gay slurs at people in the restaurant, and when the teacher and his friends tried to get away from her, she attacked him with the knife. The SFPD......

A 21-year-old trainjumping transient from Portland fell out of a Union Pacific train that she and her rottweiler were hitching a ride on. The train was in Benicia and moving at about 50 mph at the time she and the dog fell out -- but she died not from any injury from the fall but rather, from drowning in the shallow puddle in which she landed. The dog was injured too, but they have no......

The story about Rex Farrance, the PC World editor shot to death in a home invasion robbery gets more complicated, as his 19-year-old son tells the media that the "drug trade" alluded to by the police was in fact a stash of licensed medicinal marijuana that the son was keeping at the father's house with the father's knowledge. Farrance's wife, who was pistol-whipped in the attack, strongly denies any drug dealing in the house --......

As expected, the beating up of members of the Bakers Dozen acapella group is now a full blown story with all the breathless reporting and graphics that comes with it. It's even gone national with Drudge reporting that the singers were beaten up "after singing the Star Spangled Banner" as if we here in San Francisco are so anti-American that we'll beat anyone up who sings the National Anthem. ...

How did you ring in the new year? Here's an expansion on a blotter item that SFist Rita wrote about this morning: According to eyewitnesses, the 19-year-old son of the staggeringly wealthy local physician Eileen Aicardi spent it by gathering a mob of friends and then gaybashing an all-male singing group from Yale. When the assault was over, there were bruises, cuts, sprains, and facial reconstruction surgery requiring the wiring shut of the victim's......

The SFPD has put out a missing persons bulletin on a local Noe Valley family, who haven't been heard from since last week. James and Kati Kim, along with their two daughters Sabine and Penelope, drove to Seattle to spend Thanksgiving with James's family. The Kims were scheduled to be in southern Oregon last Saturday night, and had called the inn where they had reserved rooms and asked for a key to be left at......

Yet another PG&E manhole blew up this weekend -- this time, at 5:30 on Sunday at Market and Powell. PG&E blames a faulty cable and says it was no big deal. A witness at the time, however, said he saw flames shooting up out of the ground. In the big-ticket crime items: the trial of the mom who threw her three children into the bay has started; she's pleading insanity. The SFPD caught a murder......

--Arrrr. It's Talk Like A Pirate Day. Annoy your boss! --Quick crime updates that didn't make the Blotter -- the second death at the pot brownie coop is probably a drug OD. And Ohmeed Popal's case is on hold as his lawyer continues to investigate his mental condition. --Josh Wolf is heading back to jail. --You won't actually be infringing any copyrights when you watch Warner Music videos on YouTube anymore. Also -- you can......

The SFPD found the 5-month-old baby whose father claimed she was stolen from the back seat of his car in the Mission when he went out to grab some smokes. They found her body in a remote area of McLaren Park. For those of you who thought something about this case didn't sound right, consider yourselves vindicated: the father is now considered the main suspect in the murder. (We knew those Mission hipsters going to......

Lots of death and transit events to report today: Did you hear the helicopters whirring overhead in the Mission last night? The SFPD came in full force after reports of a serious shooting on Mission between 15th and 16th, right by the BART station, at about 10:30 last night. Shots were fired towards the station and four people were injured. Two are expected to live, one is fighting serious injuries, and one victim has died.......

No matter how you slice it, there can't be a good story behind this item -- southbound 280 was closed down for two hours early this morning after a naked man was struck and killed by a passing car. People had already called the police to let them know that they'd seen a man between 25-30 with tattoos running across the highway near Alemany Boulevard with his ding-dong hanging out. The SFPD arrested someone in a murder last weekend! A mother was reported stabbed to death in her apartment by her older son. As the police were investigating the scene, the younger son came home, crying, and turned himself in, saying, "I'm Carlos. I'm insane." Keep up the good work, SFPD! (As of this weekend, we were at five homicides for 2006.) And the Chron not only reports deaths -- they discover them: a Chron reporter relaxing on Ocean Beach with her family saw what she first thought was a drifting log but then realized was a body. She and her husband dragged the body out as others raced to begin CPR and call 911. The surfer has been identified as Sean O'Flaherty Fahey, who was a mechanical engineer. ...

Last week's winner, the new tabloid-style redesigned Bay Guardian. Pool of blood! Murders! Headless Body In Topless Bar! All for their 40th anniversary. Looks good -- but this type is hard to read. Various outrages in our city. And man, we thought this "Wade versus Redmond" ad on page 17 for the Third Street Gym referred to Tim Redmond. The redesign's throwing off our skim-o-tron! Cover: The SFPD ignoring Asian-American gang stabbings in the Tenderloin. And Sonic Reducer declined to go to a party with a Fleetwood Mac cover band featuring Joanna Newsom as Stevie Nicks!?!!?!??! (Well, it was raining pretty hard last week....) Making a triumphant return, the San Jose Metro!. Second Amendment advocates in San Jose use Chris Daly's own Prop H to get the right to bear arms into the state Constitution. Please, no more propositions! Haven't we learned from our mistakes of the past? Cover article: excellent Chinese subregional food in Milpitas (Darda rules). Why do alternative-rock listeners have to go all anti-Latino about the switchover at 104.9? And SFist Eve's horoscope: she should expand her spiritual life. After the jump, the two New Times publications (the Weekly and the EBX). ...

Well, we all knew it was going to happen -- SF DA Kamala Harris is bringing charges against Maureen Faibish for felony child endangerment. As Harris said at the press conference, "We are not in the business of vilifying parents, but in this city, we are also not in the business of allowing children to be placed in situations where they are killed when it is completely preventable." Sure. Meanwhile, a girl mauled by a pit bull in Santa Rosa the other day is recovering, and an elderly man successfully fled a pit bull attack in San Jose. The SFPD has released the 911 tapes (audio) of Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White's husband's subsequently-recanted tale of spousal abuse. "My wife is JOANNE HAYES-WHITE, THE FIRE CHIEF!!! Ow! No! Don't come near me again with that pint glass!! Don't hit me again! Aaaaaaaaagh!! Did I mention my wife is JOANNE HAYES-WHITE, THE FIRE CHIEF???" And the feds indicted 19 people in the medical marijuana enforcement action, or, what they're calling "Operation Urban Harvest." Kevin Ryan, the Bay Area's US Attorney, claims that the people busted were using medical marijuana stores as a front to sell $5 million of pot to healthy people. ...

We take a rare spin to the North of Market crime scene and relate the Examiner's tale of woe about a "high-flying" Pac Heights couple who came back to their apartment on Fillmore and Pacific to find that someone had stolen $100,000 worth of uninsured jewelry from a safe that they had failed to lock. The jewelry included a $25,000 engagement ring engraved with the words "The Love Of My Life" and a $11,500 wedding band. The rich, they're different from you and us. Have you seen a fluffy doggie wandering around SFO, just like in Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco (only without Michael J. Fox)? A championship bichon frise named Ryland was reported stolen from the cargo area Tuesday morning. Ryland, who was traveling from Sacto to China, was last reported seen being carted off by a man wearing a tan shirt and jeans who then jumped in his white Toyota 4Runner and then took off "at a high rate of speed." $3000 reward! And last night, the SFPD found a dead body in a burning car in McLaren Park, after responding to a report of shots being fired. The SFPD reports that it is investigating the incident as a homicide. You cannot slip anything past the SFPD! ...

Rivers Cuomo's still got his hash pipe -- but this kid doesn't! A 21 year old in Pleasanton is recovering from 3rd and 4th degree burns to his arm, hand, and face after "a device that refines hashish into marijuana" blew up his basement bathroom's water heater. The explosion was so brief that nothing else caught on fire, but the guy's facing drug charges after he gets out of the hospital. The SFPD has identified Randall Davies as the man who flipped out in Union Square on Wednesday night. The cops saw Davies make an illegal U-, but when they followed him into an alley, he jumped out of the car, grabbed a pedestrian hostage, ran into the Campton Place Hotel, fell down in the lobby, threatened the doorman trying to help him up, and fled the scene. The police IDed Davies on some mail he'd left in the abandoned car. And an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who was reported missing from the Stonestown Nordstrom's was found a day later, hiding in a bathroom in the main mall. Extra bonus! An updated roster of all your Blotter pictures since March after the jump. ...

The SFPD is on the lookout for an Asian male, possibly Filipino, after a shooting Sunday night that left one Daly City man dead and five people injured, outside the salsa club Cafe Cocomo in Dogpatch. The suspect fled the scene in a silver Range Rover with a grill on the front. Well, this is horrifying. Police in Fairfield arrested a man who had let his mother's dead body lie on the kitchen floor for two years. The man's father didn't seem to understand what was going on, but the son said that his mother had fallen some time in 2003 and not moved since. When asked why he hadn't called for help, he had no answer. The man will be booked for elder abuse, and the father has been taken into Adult Protective Custody. And a 75-year-old woman is recovering from a random knifing by the Berkeley Rose Garden. The woman and her husband were taking a walk in the early evening last week when a teenage girl and her friend grabbed her and slashed her throat with a kitchen knife. The knifing is not thought to be gang-related. ...

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....

Bay Area crime roundup...

Bay area crime roundup...

Warrant issued for the murder of Timothy Griffith....

Bay Area crime roundup...