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.
June 2026 was a calm month in Ballard — no tracked category crossed the anomaly threshold, and the single signal logged was a zero-event on homicide, meaning that category recorded no incidents in the current window. The broader picture is a mixed but mostly stable neighborhood: property crime volumes are drifting in different directions across categories, but none dramatically.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest 12-month mover, down 18.8% against the prior year (329 vs. 405). Theft from vehicle and other larceny are also running below their prior-year levels — down 4.3% and 5.1% respectively — while burglary and aggravated assault are modestly above, at 5.8% and 9.8% year-over-year. Arson's 12-month count rose from 5 to 12, a 140.0% year-over-year change, though both figures are small in absolute terms. Everything else held within its normal range this month.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through June 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 homicide 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 homicide levels.”
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.