Manhattan CD5 — Midtown Crime Rate Trends — New York
CD5 is Midtown's commercial core — Times Square, Bryant Park, the Diamond District, Rockefeller Center, the Garment District, NoMad, and Flatiron. Anchored by Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station's north edge, and the Times Square subway hub.
Five signals across Manhattan CD5 — Midtown this month, and the mix leans consistently downward. Two categories ran below trend in the current period, three show structural sustained shifts — multi-month patterns, not single-month noise — and one category registered a zero-event signal. Across property and violent crime, the direction is broadly the same.
Vandalism and theft from vehicle both ran below their recent baselines — vandalism's 12-month total sits at 686 against a baseline mean of 984.85, a gap that makes it the month's most pronounced single-category signal. Robbery is the clearest structural story: a sustained shift downward, with 411 incidents in the current 12 months against 584 in the prior year, down 29.6%. Theft from vehicle follows the same shape, off 35.4% year over year. Everything else tracked — burglary, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft, other larceny, arson — is also lower than the prior 12 months, each by double digits.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 686 incidents — about 30% below the 985 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 84 incidents — about 44% below the 149 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.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 686, down 26% from 923 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 411, down 30% from 584 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 84, down 35% from 130 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 May 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 CD5 — Midtown 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 CD3 — Bedford-Stuyvesant
688 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Manhattan CD5 — Midtown's 686.
Open page →Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown
681 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Manhattan CD5 — Midtown's 686.
Open page →Manhattan CD11 — East Harlem
692 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Manhattan CD5 — Midtown's 686.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Manhattan CD5 — Midtown, 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.