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 registered a below-trend signal for the month, and five reflect structural declines that have held across the trailing 12 months versus the prior year. The dominant shape is sustained: broad, multi-category downward pressure on property and violent crime, not a single noisy month.
Motor vehicle theft is the most prominent single-month signal, with 217 incidents in the current 12 months against a baseline of 320.57. Robbery and burglary are both sustained shifts moving downward — robbery is down 48.8% year-over-year (42 incidents vs. 82) and burglary is down 44.4% (74 vs. 133). Aggravated assault, at 35 incidents against 32 in the prior year, is the one category running counter to the broader pattern.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 217 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 93, down 48% 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 74, down 44% 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 217, down 28% from 300 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 42, down 49% from 82 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
211 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Laurel's 217.
Open page →Eastmont
209 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Laurel's 217.
Open page →Eastlake
208 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Laurel's 217.
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 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.