Central Area Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
The Central Area is the historically central neighborhood east of downtown and south of Capitol Hill, organized around 23rd Avenue and East Union, Cherry, and Jackson streets. Anchored by Garfield High School, Judkins Park, and the Central District commercial corridors; long the cultural heart of Black Seattle.
September 2026 produced a single structural signal in Central Area: a sustained shift in vandalism, not a one-month dip but a multi-month pattern now embedded in the trailing 12-month window. Every other tracked category stayed within its expected range.
Vandalism is down 25.4% against the prior 12 months, 314 incidents against 421 in the year before, the steepest year-over-year decline of any category in the neighborhood this period. Burglary also fell meaningfully, 355 incidents against 451, a 21.3% reduction, and robbery dropped 16.0% over the same window. The overall picture is broadly downward across property and violent crime, though only vandalism crossed the threshold for a sustained structural shift 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.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 314, down 25% from 421 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 Central Area 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.”
Ballard
318 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Central Area's 314.
Open page →Queen Anne
289 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 below Central Area's 314.
Open page →Rainier Valley
342 incidents over the past 12 months — 28 above Central Area's 314.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Central Area, 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.