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.
July 2026 produced a single notable signal in Piedmont Avenue: motor vehicle theft running below its multi-year trend. With only one category crossing the anomaly threshold this month, the rest of the tracked categories were within their expected ranges.
Motor vehicle theft sits at 71 incidents over the trailing 12 months, down 29.7% against the prior 12-month total of 101. Burglary and robbery are also well below their prior-year levels, down 35.5% and 56.0% respectively over the same window, reinforcing a broader downward pull on property crime. Theft from vehicle is the one category moving the other direction, at 313 incidents against 263 in the prior year, a 19.0% increase worth watching in coming months.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 71 incidents — about 42% below the 122 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through July 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 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.”
Financial District
67 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Piedmont Avenue's 71.
Open page →Chinatown
80 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Piedmont Avenue's 71.
Open page →Downtown
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Piedmont Avenue's 71.
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.