Pill Hill Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Pill Hill is a compact medical district between Broadway and Telegraph Avenue, named for its cluster of hospitals — Kaiser, Alta Bates Summit, Highland, and Children's — alongside their associated medical office buildings. Includes the Mosswood Park natural area.
Five categories moved in Pill Hill this August, four running below their single-month trend and one registering as a sustained multi-month structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward, concentrated in property crime and violent crime alike, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Theft from vehicle is the strongest signal, down 50.0% over the trailing 12 months, 85 incidents against 170 in the prior year. Robbery fell 33.3% (32 vs. 48) and aggravated assault dropped 21.0% (49 vs. 62) over the same window. Sexual assault is the one category moving in the opposite direction, up 35.3% to 23 incidents from 17, and stands apart from an otherwise consistent downward pattern across the rest of the tracked categories.
Notable signals 4
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 85 incidents — about 64% below the 235 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 32 incidents — about 49% below the 63 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 49 incidents — about 32% below the 72 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 175 incidents — about 37% below the 279 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 85, down 50% from 170 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 August 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 Pill Hill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Grand Lake
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Pill Hill's 85.
Open page →Elmhurst
77 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Pill Hill's 85.
Open page →Downtown
72 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 below Pill Hill's 85.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Pill Hill, 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.