Piedmont Avenue Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Piedmont Avenue is a linear commercial-and-residential neighborhood organized around the Piedmont Avenue corridor between MacArthur Boulevard and Mountain View Cemetery. Anchored by the historic Piedmont Theatre, a strip of cafes and restaurants, and the cemetery's tree-lined entrance.
March 2026 produced a single structural signal in Piedmont Avenue: a sustained downward shift in vandalism. With just one tracked signal this month and every other category within normal range, this is not a broad-movement month — it's a month where one category's multi-year trajectory stands apart from an otherwise stable picture.
Vandalism is down 51.0% against the prior 12 months, 51 incidents vs. 104 in the year before — the largest proportional move in any tracked category here. Robbery (-57.1%, 12 vs. 28) and burglary (-36.1%, 46 vs. 72) also show meaningful 12-month declines, though neither crossed the threshold for a tracked signal this month. Theft from vehicle runs the other direction, up 18.9% to 308 incidents, but also held within range.
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.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 51, down 51% from 104 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 Piedmont Avenue compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Downtown
49 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Piedmont Avenue's 51.
Open page →Maxwell Park
49 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Piedmont Avenue's 51.
Open page →Seminary Park
46 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Piedmont Avenue's 51.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Piedmont Avenue, 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.