Walnut Hills Crime Rate Trends — Cincinnati
Walnut Hills is a hillside neighborhood east of Over-the-Rhine, organized around Peebles' Corner at McMillan Street and Gilbert Avenue. Anchored by the historic May Festival Choral Hall and the East McMillan and Gilbert Avenue commercial corridors, with hillside residential blocks of Victorian and early-20th-century homes.
August 2026 produced two signals in Walnut Hills, both in the same category. Theft from vehicle registered both a one-month spike and a sustained structural shift, meaning the elevated count is not just a noisy single month but a pattern that has been building across the trailing year.
Theft from vehicle is up 53.6% against the prior 12 months, 172 incidents vs 112. That sustained-shift signal indicates the increase has persisted long enough to separate from normal variation. Everywhere else, the picture is broadly downward: burglary fell 30.4% (55 vs 79), motor vehicle theft fell 29.2% (68 vs 96), aggravated assault fell 36.8% (24 vs 38), and sexual assault dropped 50.0% (5 vs 10). Those declines held within range this month, with no additional signals beyond the theft-from-vehicle pair.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 172 incidents — about 80% above the 96 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.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 172, up 54% from 112 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 August 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 Walnut Hills 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.”
East Price Hill
161 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 below Walnut Hills's 172.
Open page →Westwood
187 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 above Walnut Hills's 172.
Open page →West Price Hill
103 incidents over the past 12 months — 69 below Walnut Hills's 172.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Walnut Hillsdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Theft from vehicle | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Walnut Hills's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 8 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 Walnut Hills, 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.