West Oakland Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
West Oakland is the area west of I-980 and north of the Inner Harbor, encompassing the West Oakland BART station, the Port of Oakland industrial belt, and the historic Mandela Parkway corridor. A mix of Victorian-era residential blocks, light-industrial parcels, and a recent wave of mixed-use redevelopment.
Four categories moved in West Oakland this August briefing, all downward. Three registered as single-month below-trend signals, robbery, theft from vehicle, and aggravated assault, while a fourth showed a sustained structural shift. The overall shape is a broad, across-the-board pullback in violent and property crime rather than a single outlier.
Robbery is the strongest signal: the trailing 12-month total stands at 51, down 28.2% against the prior year's 71. Theft from vehicle fell 34.3% over the same window, 142 incidents against 216 the year before. Aggravated assault follows the same direction, down 30.8% to 72 from 104. The three categories together account for the bulk of the month's movement, and everything else tracked in the neighborhood fell within its normal range.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 51 incidents — about 44% below the 91 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 142 incidents — about 42% below the 246 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 72 incidents — about 51% below the 146 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 142, down 34% from 216 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 West Oakland 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.”
Adams Point
50 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below West Oakland's 51.
Open page →Chinatown
48 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below West Oakland's 51.
Open page →Brookfield Village
43 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below West Oakland's 51.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Oakland, 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.