Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows Crime Rate Trends — New York
CD8 covers Hillcrest, Fresh Meadows, Briarwood, Jamaica Hills, Jamaica Estates, Kew Gardens Hills, Pomonok, and Utopia. Anchored by St. John's University's main campus, Queens College, the Long Island Expressway corridor, Cunningham Park, and the F train at 169th Street and 179th Street.
Two categories moved in Queens CD8, Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows this July: one below-trend signal and one above-trend spike, against a backdrop of broad multi-year declines across nearly every other tracked category. The shape of the month is a mostly improving neighborhood with two outliers pulling in opposite directions.
Sexual assault is the stronger of the two signals, with 141 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 133 in the prior year, a 6.0% rise that lifted the category above its historical range. Vandalism ran below trend for the month, part of a wider downward move: the trailing 12-month total is 372, down 9.7% from 412 the year before. Burglary, other larceny, theft from vehicle, motor vehicle theft, and aggravated assault all posted year-over-year declines of 13.9% to 19.6%, and everything else in the tracked mix held flat or fell. The sexual assault move is the one category bucking that direction.
Notable signals 2
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 141 incidents — about 42% above the 100 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 372 incidents — about 34% below the 561 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through July 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 Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month sexual assault 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 sexual assault levels.”
Brooklyn CD4 — Bushwick
141 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 141.
Open page →Brooklyn CD1 — Williamsburg / Greenpoint
142 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 141.
Open page →Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood
145 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 141.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadowsdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across New York); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows, 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.