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.
Four categories moved in Queens CD8 this August, a mix of one below-trend drop, one one-month spike, and two sustained structural shifts. The dominant structural story is broadly downward across violent and property crime, but the sexual assault spike breaks that pattern and is the signal that stands out.
Aggravated assault is down 30.2% over the trailing 12 months, 171 incidents against 245 in the prior year, consistent with a multi-month structural shift rather than a single quiet period. Burglary and motor vehicle theft are also well below prior-year levels, down 27.0% and 23.9% respectively. Against that backdrop, sexual assault registered a one-month spike: 134 incidents in the current 12-month window against 130 in the prior year, a move that runs counter to the otherwise downward trend across the neighborhood. Vandalism ran below trend as a one-month drop, while everything else tracked within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 134 incidents — about 34% above the 100 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 343 incidents — about 39% below the 559 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.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 171, down 30% from 245 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 168, down 27% from 230 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 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.”
Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / Inwood
133 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 134.
Open page →Queens CD10 — Howard Beach / Ozone Park
135 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 134.
Open page →Bronx CD11 — Pelham Parkway / Morris Park
139 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 134.
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 | 2 | — 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.