Westlake Crime Rate Trends — Oakland
Westlake is a compact downtown-adjacent neighborhood between Lake Merritt's southern lobe and 14th Street, organized around the Westlake commercial blocks and the Lake Merritt Channel. A mix of mid-rise apartments and pre-war commercial buildings.
Six tracked signals surfaced in Westlake this May — a streak-break in Arson, two one-month below-trend readings, and three sustained structural shifts. The dominant shape is a broad, multi-month pull-down across property crime, with the Arson streak-break as the month's most distinctive single event: a category returning after a long quiet gap.
Robbery and Vandalism both ran below trend this month, and Theft from Vehicle registered as a sustained shift downward — 207 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 317 the year before, a 34.7% reduction. Robbery and Vandalism tell a similar story in the 12-month numbers: Robbery is down 37.5% year-over-year, Vandalism down 38.4%. The rest of the tracked categories were within range, with the exception of Homicide and Aggravated Assault, which each edged modestly higher on a 12-month basis — 15.4% and 14.3% respectively — but did not cross anomaly thresholds this period.
Notable signals 3
Arson
First incident since December 2023 — a 2-year gap ended this month.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 47% below the 38 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 69 incidents — about 75% below the 277 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 207, down 35% from 317 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 69, down 38% from 112 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 160, down 26% 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 May 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 Westlake compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month arson 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 arson levels.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Westlake, 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.