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.
March 2026 produced two signals in Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows, moving in opposite directions. Sexual assault spiked above trend while vandalism ran below it — a split month rather than a broad directional move across the neighborhood.
Sexual assault is the sharper of the two signals: the current 12-month total of 155 incidents compares to a prior-year total of 120, a 29.2% increase year-over-year. Vandalism, by contrast, sits at 413 incidents against 456 in the prior 12 months, down 9.4%. Every other tracked category — burglary, motor vehicle theft, aggravated assault, theft from vehicle, robbery, arson, other larceny — came in within normal range for the month.
Notable signals 2
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 155 incidents — about 58% above the 98 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 413 incidents — about 27% below the 568 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 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 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 CD14 — Flatbush / Midwood
152 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 155.
Open page →Bronx CD5 — Fordham / University Heights
160 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 155.
Open page →Brooklyn CD1 — Williamsburg / Greenpoint
161 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows's 155.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows has spiked sexual assault historically (20 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual assault | 20 | 100% |
| Aggravated assault | 12 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 11 | 100% |
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.