Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood Crime Rate Trends — New York
Manhattan's northernmost community district covers Washington Heights, Hudson Heights, and Inwood. Anchored by the George Washington Bridge bus station, Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, Inwood Hill Park, the A train and 1 train spines, and the Columbia University Medical Center / NewYork-Presbyterian campus.
Two categories moved in Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood this month: one single-month below-trend signal and one structural shift. The month's shape is narrow but meaningful — the two signals point in the same direction, and both involve property crime pulling lower.
Vandalism is the sharper move: the current 12-month total of 659 incidents runs well below the multi-year baseline of 927.39, a sustained gap that this month registered as a one-month drop. Theft from vehicle has shifted structurally — 243 incidents over the current 12 months against 337 in the prior year, down 27.9% — a sustained shift rather than a single quiet month. Every other tracked category, from robbery at 403 to aggravated assault at 591, came in within its normal range.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 659 incidents — about 29% below the 927 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 243, down 28% from 337 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 March 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.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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
Vandalism
How Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Brooklyn CD18 — Canarsie / Flatlands
653 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood's 659.
Open page →Brooklyn CD2 — Brooklyn Heights / Fort Greene
649 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood's 659.
Open page →Brooklyn CD1 — Williamsburg / Greenpoint
671 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 above Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood's 659.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwooddoesn'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 Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 2 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 New York); 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 Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood, 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 the NYPD Complaint dataset on NYC Open Data, mapped to 10 UCR-aligned categories, and aggregated to community district × 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.