Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown Crime Rate Trends — New York
CD3 covers the Lower East Side, Chinatown, the East Village, and Two Bridges. Anchored by the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridge approaches, Tompkins Square Park, Seward Park, and the F/M/J/Z lines along Delancey Street and East Houston.
March 2026 produced a narrow but structurally meaningful month for Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown. Two categories moved, both as sustained shifts rather than one-month noise, and both in the same direction: vehicle-related theft is running lower across the full 12-month window, not just this month.
Theft from Vehicle is down 35.1% against the prior 12 months — 87 incidents vs. 134 — and Motor Vehicle Theft is down 35.8%, from 109 to 70. Both are classified as sustained shifts, meaning the gap has held across multiple months rather than appearing in a single reporting period. Every other tracked category in the neighborhood — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, and the rest — came in within its normal range.
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 has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 87, down 35% from 134 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 70, down 36% from 109 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 CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Manhattan CD6 — Stuyvesant Town / Turtle Bay
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown's 70.
Open page →Queens CD14 — Far Rockaway / Broad Channel
75 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown's 70.
Open page →Manhattan CD4 — Chelsea / Hell's Kitchen
64 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown's 70.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown, 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 SFPD's open dataset, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to neighborhood × 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.