Grand Lake Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Grand Lake is a Lake Merritt-adjacent neighborhood organized around the Grand Lake Theatre, the Grand Avenue commercial strip, and Lakeshore Avenue. A mix of pre-war apartment buildings and Victorian houses, with weekend farmers markets at Splash Pad Park.
Four categories moved in Grand Lake this August, split evenly between one-month below-trend signals and multi-month structural shifts. The shape of the month is broadly downward on property crime: theft from vehicle appears twice in the top signals, once as a single-month drop and once as a sustained multi-year shift, pointing to a longer-running change rather than a one-off quiet month.
Other larceny is down 31.5% against the prior 12 months, 139 incidents vs. 203 in the year before, and registers as the strongest single-month below-trend signal. Theft from vehicle is down 44.8% over the same window, 90 incidents vs. 163, with the sustained-shift signal confirming this is a structural move, not noise. Vandalism and robbery also ran lower year-over-year, at -20.9% and -8.3% respectively, while motor vehicle theft edged up 7.8% and homicide ticked from 10 to 11 over the trailing 12 months, neither dramatic enough to break into the top signals this period.
Notable signals 2
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 139 incidents — about 35% below the 214 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 90 incidents — about 72% below the 319 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 90, down 45% from 163 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 139, down 32% from 203 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 Grand Lake 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.”
Millsmont
139 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Grand Lake's 139.
Open page →Piedmont Avenue
138 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Grand Lake's 139.
Open page →Longfellow
143 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Grand Lake's 139.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Grand Lake, 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.