Downtown Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Downtown Seattle is the central business district fronting Elliott Bay between Belltown and Pioneer Square, anchored by Pike Place Market, the Seattle waterfront, and the central Link light rail tunnel. Includes the retail core along Pine and Pike, the financial district, and the convention-center spine.
August 2026 produced no tracked signals in Downtown Seattle. No category crossed an anomaly threshold this month, which means the shape of the month is structural rather than episodic: what the 12-month trends show is the story.
Theft from vehicle is down 12.8% against the prior 12 months, 1,874 incidents versus 2,150, and vandalism is down 14.0%, 1,050 versus 1,221. Other larceny moved in the opposite direction, up 13.9% to 1,890 from 1,659. Sexual assault continued its multi-year slide, 15 incidents over the current 12 months against 22 in the prior period. Robbery ticked up 6.0% to 316, the one modest uptick in an otherwise broadly flat-to-declining violent crime picture. Everything else held within a narrow band.
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 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
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 Downtown 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.”
Capitol Hill
959 incidents over the past 12 months — 931 below Downtown's 1,890.
Open page →Delridge
801 incidents over the past 12 months — 1089 below Downtown's 1,890.
Open page →Northgate
688 incidents over the past 12 months — 1202 below Downtown's 1,890.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Downtown, 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.