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.
Cascade had a quiet August 2026. One structural signal surfaced across all tracked categories: vandalism has shifted downward at the 12-month level, a sustained multi-month pattern rather than a single below-trend month. Everything else in the neighborhood ran within normal range.
Vandalism is down 29.3% against the prior 12 months, 191 incidents in the current period against 270 in the year before. That is the dominant story for August. Robbery shows a 60.0% increase over the same comparison window, 40 incidents vs. 25, but no monthly signal crossed the anomaly threshold for that category this period. Property crime categories including burglary, theft from vehicle, other larceny, and motor vehicle theft all show year-over-year declines of roughly 10% to 19%, but none registered a signal beyond the vandalism sustained shift.
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 191, down 29% from 270 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 August 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
213 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 above Cascade's 191.
Open page →Northeast
216 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 above Cascade's 191.
Open page →Northwest
218 incidents over the past 12 months — 27 above Cascade's 191.
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.