Laurel Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
The Laurel is a foothill-edge neighborhood along MacArthur Boulevard south of I-580, organized around the Laurel commercial district at MacArthur and 35th Avenue. Predominantly Craftsman bungalows and small apartment buildings on sloped streets toward the hills.
Six categories moved in Laurel this March — one below-trend signal and five sustained structural shifts, all running in the same direction. The dominant pattern is a multi-year compression in property and violent crime across the board, not a single month's noise.
Motor vehicle theft is the most prominent single-month signal, with the current 12-month total at 218 against a baseline mean of 320.57 — down 27.3% year-over-year. Robbery and burglary both carry sustained-shift signals reflecting longer structural declines: robbery is down 47.6% over the prior 12 months (43 incidents vs. 82), and burglary is down 42.9% (76 vs. 133). The remaining categories in the sustained-shift group — including vandalism, down 42.2%, and theft from vehicle, down 46.9% — reinforce that the move in Laurel is broad, not concentrated in one bucket.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 218 incidents — about 32% below the 321 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 94, down 47% from 177 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 76, down 43% from 133 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 218, down 27% from 300 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 63, down 42% from 109 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 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 Laurel 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.”
Brookfield Village
212 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Laurel's 218.
Open page →Eastmont
210 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Laurel's 218.
Open page →Eastlake
208 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below Laurel's 218.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Laurel, 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.