Cascade Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Cascade is a small neighborhood at the south end of Lake Union, encompassing the South Lake Union innovation district and the historic Cascade residential pocket east of Westlake. Now dominated by Amazon's headquarters campus, life sciences buildings, and the South Lake Union streetcar.
September 2026 was a structurally quiet month in Cascade, Seattle. One category, vandalism, registered a sustained shift downward, and one zero-event signal rounded out the total. No spikes, no rare events, no streak breaks: the pattern is one of gradual, multi-month contraction rather than acute movement.
Vandalism is the clearest structural story, down 25.0% over the trailing 12 months, 195 incidents against 260 in the prior year. That move qualifies as a sustained shift, meaning it reflects months of consistent change, not a single quiet period. Every other tracked category, burglary, theft from vehicle, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, and aggravated assault, ran within a declining or stable range, while robbery is the one category moving in the opposite direction, up 48.0% over 12 months, 37 incidents against 25.
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.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 195, down 25% from 260 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 Cascade compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
West Seattle
210 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 above Cascade's 195.
Open page →Northeast
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 19 above Cascade's 195.
Open page →Northwest
215 incidents over the past 12 months — 20 above Cascade's 195.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Cascade, 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.