Downtown Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Downtown is Oakland's central business district, anchored by City Hall, the 12th and 19th Street BART stations, and the historic Oakland City Center. Mixed-use blocks of office towers, civic buildings, and converted warehouses, bordered by Lake Merritt to the east.
May 2026 was a quiet month for Downtown Oakland — no tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the flag count sits at zero. The story is structural rather than event-driven: the 12-month trend lines show broad improvement across the heaviest-volume categories, and no category registered a one-month spike.
Theft from vehicle is down 27.3% against the prior 12 months, 101 incidents vs. 139. Motor vehicle theft follows the same direction, down 31.8% to 60 incidents from 88. Homicide shows the sharpest 12-month shift — 5 incidents in the current period against 11 in the year before, a 54.5% reduction. Aggravated assault and sexual assault both edged upward on a 12-month basis, though neither generated a signal this month, and the absolute counts remain small.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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 May 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 Downtown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Upper Rockridge
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Downtown's 87.
Open page →Seminary Park
91 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Downtown's 87.
Open page →Financial District
93 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Downtown's 87.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Downtown, 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.