Evanston Crime Rate Trends — Cincinnati
Evanston is an urban neighborhood north of Walnut Hills along Montgomery Road and Dana Avenue. Predominantly historic single-family and two-flat homes; Xavier University's main campus sits along its eastern edge.
Two categories moved in Evanston this April — one a single-month spike, one a structural multi-year shift. That pairing is the shape of this briefing: not a broad sweep across property crime, but two concentrated signals pointing in the same direction.
Theft from vehicle registered the spike, against a 12-month total of 70 incidents — up from 65 the prior year, and above the multi-year baseline of 39.89. Other larceny is the sustained shift: 119 incidents in the current 12-month window against 72 in the prior year, a 65.3% increase that reflects a structural move, not a single noisy month. Every other tracked category — aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, sexual assault — ran within range and generated no signals.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 70 incidents — about 75% above the 40 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 119, up 65% from 72 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through April 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
How Evanston compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable theft from vehicle levels.”
Clifton
67 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Evanston's 70.
Open page →College Hill
67 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Evanston's 70.
Open page →Northside
74 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Evanston's 70.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Evanston has spiked theft from vehicle historically (14 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 14.3% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Theft from vehicle | 14 | 14.3% |
| Other larceny | 6 | 0% |
Each row shows Evanston's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Cincinnati); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Evanston, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from Cincinnati Open Data — STARS Category Offenses post-2024-06-03 plus PDI Crime Incidents back to 2020 — mapped to 8 UCR-aligned categories (vandalism and arson aren't recoverable across the STARS migration boundary). Aggregated to Statistical Neighborhood Approximation × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.