Over-the-Rhine Crime Rate Trends — Cincinnati
Over-the-Rhine is a historic neighborhood immediately north of downtown, named for the Miami and Erie Canal that 19th-century German immigrants likened to the Rhine. Anchored by Findlay Market, Music Hall on Washington Park, and the Vine Street and Main Street commercial corridors lined with Italianate and Queen Anne buildings.
April 2026 produced a single tracked signal in Over-the-Rhine: a sustained shift in theft from vehicle, meaning this is a structural multi-month move, not a one-month outlier. The rest of the tracked categories — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny, motor vehicle theft — all fell within normal range and generated no signals.
Theft from vehicle is up 63.3% against the prior 12 months, 405 incidents vs 248 in the year before. That gap is large enough to reflect a change in baseline conditions, not a single noisy month. Aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft are both running below prior-year levels — down 14.1% and 17.7% respectively — but neither crossed a signal threshold this period.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 405, up 63% from 248 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 Over-the-Rhine 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.”
Downtown
423 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 above Over-the-Rhine's 405.
Open page →Westwood
227 incidents over the past 12 months — 178 below Over-the-Rhine's 405.
Open page →CUF
199 incidents over the past 12 months — 206 below Over-the-Rhine's 405.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Over-the-Rhine has spiked theft from vehicle historically (7 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Theft from vehicle | 7 | 100% |
| Burglary | 4 | — too few |
| Other larceny | 3 | — too few |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Over-the-Rhine's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 Over-the-Rhine, 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.