Chinatown Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Chinatown is a compact downtown neighborhood centered on 8th and Webster Streets, anchored by produce markets, restaurants, and Madison Square Park. One of the oldest continuously occupied Chinatowns in North America, immediately southeast of the Lake Merritt BART station.
Four categories moved in Chinatown this March — one below-trend drop and three sustained structural shifts. The structural picture is mixed: burglary and motor vehicle theft are both running well below their multi-year baselines, while other larceny and several other categories have moved durably higher. This is not a uniformly quiet neighborhood; it's one where different crime types are moving in opposite directions at the same time.
Motor vehicle theft is the most prominent single signal: 97 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline mean of 218.95, a reduction of more than half. Burglary shows a similar structural drop — 67 incidents in the current 12 months versus 140 in the prior year, down 52.1%. Moving the other direction, other larceny has risen 33.8% year-over-year (305 vs. 228), and that shift registers as sustained, not a one-month move. The remaining categories — robbery down 25.4%, aggravated assault up 28.0% — were within tracked range but add to a picture of a neighborhood in which property crime is diverging sharply by type.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 97 incidents — about 56% below the 219 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 97, down 61% from 246 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 67, down 52% from 140 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 305, up 34% from 228 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 Chinatown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Golden Gate
94 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Chinatown's 97.
Open page →Rockridge
102 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Chinatown's 97.
Open page →Millsmont
110 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 above Chinatown's 97.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Chinatown, 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 OPD's CrimeWatch feed on Oakland Open Data, 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.