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.
April 2026 was a quiet month in Ballard. Across eight tracked categories, no single-month spikes, drops, or sustained-shift signals triggered — the one signal recorded was a zero-event for Homicide, meaning the category produced no incidents in the current window. The structural picture across the neighborhood is broadly one of gradual decline in property crime, with no acute moves this period.
Motor vehicle theft is down 19.5% over the trailing 12 months (351 vs. 436 the year prior), and vandalism is down 14.8% (328 vs. 385). Burglary is the one category running against that grain — up 8.7% year-over-year at 539 incidents vs. 496 — but it did not generate a single-month signal this period. Everything else, including theft from vehicle at 714 incidents and other larceny at 675, landed within normal range.
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 April 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.”
Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Ballard has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (12 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 75% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 12 | 75% |
| Vandalism | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Ballard's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Seattle); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
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.