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.
March 2026 in Chinatown was shaped by structural shifts, not one-month noise. Four tracked signals surfaced — one below-trend drop and three sustained shifts, meaning the dominant pattern is multi-year repositioning across property crime categories, not a single outlier month.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest move: 96 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a baseline of 218.95, down 61.0% from the prior 12-month total of 246. Burglary has also shifted structurally downward — 65 incidents this year against 140 prior, a 53.6% 12-month reduction. Moving the other direction, other larceny has logged a sustained increase, 303 incidents versus 228 in the year before, a 32.9% rise. The remaining tracked categories — including aggravated assault up 28.0% and theft from vehicle up 15.8% — did not cross an anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 96 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 96, 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 65, down 54% 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 303, up 33% 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 — 2 below Chinatown's 96.
Open page →Rockridge
103 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Chinatown's 96.
Open page →Millsmont
110 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 above Chinatown's 96.
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 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.