San Francisco is looking to build on a new set of policing strategies that helped shrink auto burglaries significantly in the first three months of the year, after a dismal 2017 that saw an average of 85 break-ins a day, officials said Wednesday.

Citywide, car break-ins fell 17 percent in the period from January through March, compared with the same period last year, police data show. The number reported in March was down 24 percent year to year.

Officials credit the dip to a constellation of adjustments the city and its police force made to try to contain the epidemic, including expanding foot patrols, focusing on burglary hot spots and creating a centralized investigation team to pursue cases citywide.

Police said they have also placed a greater emphasis on collecting fingerprints from break-in crime scenes in an effort to grow the city’s database of prints.

Perhaps the most visible example of the efforts in San Francisco — which posted the worst break-in rate of any big city in the state last year — is the Park Smart campaign, a public-awareness initiative to remind city residents, and especially vulnerable tourists, never to leave valuables in cars.

On Thursday, Mayor Mark Farrell and Police Chief Bill Scott will announce a vast expansion of the campaign.

San Francisco residents and visitors saw their faith in police ability to curb property crimes deeply shaken last year, when vehicle break-ins rose 24 percent from 2016. Less than 2 percent of those incidents resulted in arrests, data show, which has ramped up pressure on city officials to respond, and do it quickly.

Restoring confidence among motorists will take time, and city officials acknowledge that they have a long way to go. But the strides so far this year have city officials feeling they’re on the right track.

“At the end of the day, a crime prevented is much better than a crime solved,” Farrell said. “We have a car break-in epidemic in San Francisco that, thankfully, has been decreasing here in 2018, but we cannot rest on our laurels.”

The police force has nearly doubled foot patrol officers since September, from 76 to 140 since September, while reorganizing assignments at district stations to better address property crimes, officials said.

In November, Chief Scott reinstated a centralized investigative unit focused on robberies, burglaries and vehicle crimes. Ten investigators now work on car break-in cases exclusively, he said.

Farrell has also pledged to further increase overall police staffing in the city’s upcoming budget.

“We’re working collaboratively with the SFPD to finalize those details,” he said.

Police are also working to expand their database of fingerprints collected from car break-ins, a bid to spot repeat offenders.

Most officers carry fingerprinting kits when responding to car break-in calls, Scott said. But the department is now training 36 additional non-patrol officers to collect prints at all 10 district stations, giving victims more options when reporting a break-in.

Scott urged car break-in victims to spend the time needed for officers to process a car for prints.

“You wake up and your car’s been broken into. You still have to go to work, so you might not take that moment to get your car fingerprinted,” Scott said. “Oftentimes, there’s absolutely nothing to follow up on. So whatever we can do to increase what we can get into our (fingerprint) database for comparison purposes, it helps us have a better chance of solving the case.”

In February, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón set up a tip line for victims and witnesses of auto break-ins, and announced that he was seeking city funding to create an auto burglary task force.

In perhaps the most novel potential approach to the problem, the city has begun studying whether it should seek to create a dedicated criminal court department to deal with property crimes.

“I’m going to be exploring, with our criminal justice partners — including the court system, the district attorney and the public defender — ways that we can focus on car break-ins and make sure we hold people accountable,” Farrell said.

While it may seem like an unsatisfactory solution to some, officials said the heightened public awareness about the property crime problem, and the need to clear cars of visible valuables, have served as a key deterrent to would-be thieves.

The Park Smart campaign’s theme is a simple one, Scott said: “We just want to make sure people do everything they can to not make themselves easy prey.”

In coming weeks, the city will be putting signs, stickers and pamphlets on parking meters, garages and Muni buses, reminding people to keep their valuables on their person, not in their cars.

“If you love it, don’t leave it,” say many of the signs, which will be placed in well-traveled areas, tourist destinations and burglary hot spots.

“We’ve had some really sad stories,” said Troy Campbell, executive director of the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefit District. “People have had cameras stolen with all of their vacation photos on it; passports, cash, wallets.”

In addition to Fisherman’s Wharf, the city plans to put Park Smart messaging at Fifth and Mission streets in the South of Market neighborhood, Alamo Square, Dolores Park and the Palace of Fine Arts.

Campbell said he was heartened by the decrease in break-ins.

“Proliferating that message across the whole city, rather than just little organizations spreading the word here and there — it’s going to make a tremendous leap forward,” he said.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa