West End Crime Rate Trends — Cincinnati
West End is a downtown-adjacent neighborhood between Central Parkway and the Mill Creek, west of the I-75 trench. Anchored by Music Hall on Washington Park, the FC Cincinnati TQL Stadium at the south end, and a historic core of African American institutions along Linn Street and Central Parkway.
Two categories moved in West End this September, one in each direction. Aggravated assault registered a one-month spike, the strongest single signal this briefing, while theft from vehicle is tracking as a sustained multi-month structural shift downward. The mix is narrow but pointed: pressure on one side of the ledger, structural relief on the other.
Aggravated assault is up 16.0% over the trailing 12 months, 58 incidents against 50 in the prior year, and the September spike sits above even that elevated recent baseline. Theft from vehicle has moved the other way at a structural level, down 35.0% year over year, 65 incidents against 100. Every other tracked category, including robbery, burglary, other larceny, and motor vehicle theft, came in within normal range for the month.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 58 incidents — about 39% above the 42 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 has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 65, down 35% from 100 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 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 West End compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Winton Hills
59 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above West End's 58.
Open page →Over-the-Rhine
48 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below West End's 58.
Open page →East Price Hill
46 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below West End's 58.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
West Enddoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Burglary | 1 | — too few |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows West End'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 West End, 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.