Temescal Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Temescal is a North Oakland commercial-and-residential neighborhood organized around the Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street commercial corridor, just south of Berkeley. Anchored by Temescal Alley, weekend street markets, and a cluster of food destinations.
Eight categories moved in Temescal this March — three registered as one-month below-trend signals and five as sustained structural shifts. The dominant pattern is broad, multi-year decline across violent and property crime, not a single quiet month.
Robbery, burglary, and motor vehicle theft all ran below trend, with robbery the sharpest: 19 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline of 52.77 and a prior-year total of 47, down 59.6%. Burglary fell 50.4% year-over-year (59 vs. 119), and motor vehicle theft dropped 41.4% (116 vs. 198). Theft from vehicle is the one category moving against that grain — up 42.3% over the prior 12 months, 969 incidents vs. 681 — and stands out as the clearest counter-trend in an otherwise broadly contracting picture.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 19 incidents — about 64% below the 53 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 59 incidents — about 53% below the 125 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 116 incidents — about 55% below the 258 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 969, up 42% from 681 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 235, down 33% from 350 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 116, down 41% from 198 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 59, down 50% from 119 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 Temescal compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Jingletown
19 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Temescal's 19.
Open page →Clinton
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Temescal's 19.
Open page →Rockridge
18 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Temescal's 19.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Temescaldoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Homicide | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Temescal's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Oakland); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Temescal, 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.