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.
April 2026 produced no tracked signals in Central Area — zero categories crossed the anomaly threshold this month. Across the eight tracked buckets, every category landed within its expected range, making this a structurally quiet month with nothing that broke trend in either direction.
The 12-month picture is more varied. Motor vehicle theft is down 17.7% against the prior year (317 incidents vs. 385), and other larceny is down 11.6% (632 vs. 715) — both showing meaningful year-over-year reductions. Aggravated assault runs the other direction, up 16.2% over the same period (129 vs. 111), though that move did not cross the signal threshold this month. Everything else — robbery, burglary, theft from vehicle, vandalism, and arson — held close enough to prior-year levels that no category registered a notable 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.
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 Central Area compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
North Central
621 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 below Central Area's 632.
Open page →Rainier Valley
621 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 below Central Area's 632.
Open page →Northeast
645 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 above Central Area's 632.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Central Area has spiked robbery historically (5 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 14 | 57.1% |
| Robbery | 5 | 100% |
| Aggravated assault | 4 | — too few |
| Motor vehicle theft | 3 | — too few |
| Burglary | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Central Area's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 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.