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.
August 2026 brought four tracked signals in Manhattan CD5, Midtown, split across two one-month below-trend moves and two sustained multi-month structural shifts, plus a zero-event category. The shape is broadly downward: no category registered a spike, and the signals point in the same direction across both short-term and structural time horizons.
Vandalism and theft from vehicle both ran below trend in August, with vandalism the stronger of the two moves, 708 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 868 in the year before, a 18.4% reduction. Robbery has shifted structurally lower as well, 386 incidents in the current 12 months versus 563 prior, down 31.4%, a pattern that predates August and shows up as a sustained shift rather than a single quiet month. Motor vehicle theft and arson are also well off their prior-year paces, down 52.8% and 53.8% respectively, though neither crossed the signal threshold this month. Everything else held within range.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 708 incidents — about 28% below the 981 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 81 incidents — about 45% below the 148 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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 386, down 31% from 563 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 25, down 53% from 53 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 August 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.”
Manhattan CD3 — Lower East Side / Chinatown
697 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 below Manhattan CD5 — Midtown's 708.
Open page →Bronx CD1 — Mott Haven / Melrose
733 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 above Manhattan CD5 — Midtown's 708.
Open page →Manhattan CD11 — East Harlem
676 incidents over the past 12 months — 32 below Manhattan CD5 — Midtown's 708.
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.