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.
Five categories moved in West Oakland this July briefing, all pointing the same direction. Three registered as one-month below-trend signals, burglary, robbery, and theft from vehicle, and two registered as sustained multi-month structural shifts. There are no spikes and no rare events. The overall shape is a broad, consistent decline across property and violent crime.
Burglary is the strongest of the three below-trend signals, with 92 incidents over the current 12 months against 131 in the prior year, a 29.8% drop. Robbery and theft from vehicle follow the same pattern: robbery is down 33.3% year-over-year (50 vs. 75) and theft from vehicle is down 37.4% (139 vs. 222). The two sustained-shift signals add structural depth to that picture, suggesting the declines in West Oakland are not a single quiet month but a longer-running change in the data.
Notable signals 3
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 92 incidents — about 45% below the 167 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 50 incidents — about 45% below the 92 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 139 incidents — about 44% below the 247 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 139, down 37% from 222 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 92, down 30% from 131 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 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 West Oakland compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Lockwood Gardens
86 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below West Oakland's 92.
Open page →Melrose
78 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 below West Oakland's 92.
Open page →Brookfield Village
75 incidents over the past 12 months — 17 below West Oakland's 92.
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.