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.
Two categories moved in Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights this March: one one-month below-trend signal in vandalism and one sustained structural shift in robbery. The overall picture is a neighborhood where both property and violent crime are running below prior-year levels across most tracked categories, with the two signals pointing in the same direction.
Vandalism is the sharpest single-month move — 364 incidents in the current 12 months against a baseline mean of 698.45, and down 23.4% against the prior 12-month total of 475. Robbery's sustained shift reflects a longer pattern: 151 incidents in the current 12 months versus 204 in the year before, a 26.0% year-over-year reduction that has persisted across multiple months rather than arriving as a single quiet period. All other tracked categories — including aggravated assault, burglary, and theft from vehicle — remained within expected range this month.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 364 incidents — about 48% below the 698 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 151, down 26% from 204 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 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.”
Bronx CD8 — Riverdale / Fieldston
353 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 below Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights's 364.
Open page →Brooklyn CD9 — South Crown Heights / Lefferts Gardens
382 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 above Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights's 364.
Open page →Brooklyn CD15 — Sheepshead Bay
386 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 above Manhattan CD9 — Morningside Heights / Hamilton Heights's 364.
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 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.