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.
Eight categories moved in Laurel this May — three one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts, with the dominant direction across the neighborhood broadly downward. The sustained-shift count is the more significant story here: five categories have moved far enough, for long enough, to register as multi-year structural changes rather than single quiet months.
Motor vehicle theft, theft from vehicle, and homicide all ran below trend in May, leading the top signals. Over the trailing 12 months, robbery is down 56.4% against the prior year (34 incidents vs. 78), theft from vehicle down 53.5% (80 vs. 172), and homicide down 53.1% (15 vs. 32) — the kind of breadth across violent and property categories that points to something more durable than a seasonal dip. Aggravated assault, at 35 incidents against 31 in the prior year, is the one category running counter to the trend, up 12.9% year-over-year.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 230 incidents — about 28% below the 318 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 80 incidents — about 50% below the 159 average from prior years.
Homicide
The past 12 months saw 15 incidents — about 51% below the 31 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 80, down 54% from 172 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 277, down 29% from 391 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 34, down 56% from 78 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 46% from 124 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 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 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.”
Dimond District
237 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Laurel's 230.
Open page →Jack London Square
221 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Laurel's 230.
Open page →Eastmont
215 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 below Laurel's 230.
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.