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.
Piedmont Avenue had a narrow month: one tracked signal, all of it structural. Vandalism is the sole anomaly — not a one-month dip but a sustained multi-month shift, now down 36.2% against the prior 12-month period. Everything else across the neighborhood's tracked categories stayed within normal range.
The vandalism move is the meaningful one: 60 incidents in the current 12 months against 94 in the year before. Robbery and motor vehicle theft also show large year-over-year declines — 51.9% and 25.5% respectively — though neither crossed the threshold for a formal signal this month. Theft from vehicle moved the other direction, up 22.7% over the same window (324 vs. 264), and is the category to watch if that 12-month gap continues to widen.
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 60, down 36% from 94 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 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.”
Laurel
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Piedmont Avenue's 60.
Open page →San Antonio
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Piedmont Avenue's 60.
Open page →Longfellow
57 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Piedmont Avenue's 60.
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 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.