Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights Crime Rate Trends — New York
CD9 covers Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, Hamilton Heights, and Sugar Hill. Anchored by Columbia University and its Manhattanville expansion, the City College of New York campus, Riverside Church, and Riverside and Morningside parks.
Nine categories moved in Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights this May, with four one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts. The shape is broadly and consistently downward across both violent and property crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Vandalism leads the signal list: the trailing 12-month total is 297, down 32.5% from 440 the prior year and well below the multi-year baseline. Other larceny and robbery also registered below-trend signals — other larceny at 1,243 incidents against 1,751 prior-year, robbery at 119 against 195, a 39.0% year-over-year decline. The five sustained-shift signals indicate these aren't single quiet months; the downward movement across categories has been structural across the trailing two-year window.
Notable signals 4
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 297 incidents — about 57% below the 692 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 1,243 incidents — about 28% below the 1737 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 119 incidents — about 49% below the 232 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 100 incidents — about 40% below the 167 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 1,243, down 29% from 1,751 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 297, down 33% from 440 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 119, down 39% from 195 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 259, down 28% from 361 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 CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights 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 CD15 — Sheepshead Bay
303 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights's 297.
Open page →Brooklyn CD9 — South Crown Heights / Lefferts Gardens
306 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights's 297.
Open page →Staten Island CD3 — South Shore
311 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 above Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights's 297.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights, 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.