Westwood Crime Rate Trends — Cincinnati
Westwood is the largest West Side neighborhood by population, along Harrison Avenue and Glenway Avenue. Predominantly single-family residential with the Westwood Town Hall historic district and the Harrison Avenue corridor as its commercial spine.
Two categories moved in Westwood this September: an aggravated assault spike and a sustained structural drop in motor vehicle theft. The overall picture is mixed rather than uniformly trending in one direction, with one category running above its usual range while another has shifted downward over a longer stretch.
Aggravated assault is the sharper signal, with 84 incidents in the current 12-month window against 67 in the prior year, a 25.4% rise. Motor vehicle theft tells the opposite story over the same horizon: 191 incidents against 284 in the prior 12 months, down 32.7%, a multi-month structural shift rather than a single quiet stretch. Robbery and sexual assault also declined year-over-year, 45 vs. 64 and 15 vs. 22 respectively, but neither crossed an anomaly threshold this month; every other tracked category finished within its expected range.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 84 incidents — about 51% above the 56 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 191, down 33% from 284 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 Westwood 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.”
Avondale
94 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 above Westwood's 84.
Open page →Winton Hills
59 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 below Westwood's 84.
Open page →West End
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 26 below Westwood's 84.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Westwooddoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Westwood'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 Westwood, 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.