Ballard Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Ballard is a Northwest Seattle neighborhood organized around Market Street and the Ballard Locks where Salmon Bay meets Shilshole Bay. Historically a Scandinavian fishing and milling town that the city annexed in 1907; today anchored by the Ballard Avenue commercial strip, the Sunday farmers market, and the working waterfront along Salmon Bay.
September 2026 produced two signals in Ballard, one sustained structural shift and one zero-event signal. The dominant story is a multi-year compression in motor vehicle theft, not a single quiet month but a durable change in the pattern. Everything else tracked within normal range.
Motor vehicle theft is down 35.7% across the trailing 12 months, 259 incidents against 403 in the prior year. That gap has held long enough to register as a sustained shift rather than a one-month anomaly. Aggravated assault and robbery both moved higher year-over-year, 29.3% and 22.2% respectively, though neither crossed the anomaly threshold this month, meaning those moves remain within the range of normal variation for Ballard.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 259, down 36% from 403 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 September 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 Ballard compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Beacon Hill
260 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Ballard's 259.
Open page →Northeast
253 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Ballard's 259.
Open page →Queen Anne
278 incidents over the past 12 months — 19 above Ballard's 259.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Ballard, 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 SPD's Crime Data feed on Seattle 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.