Lake City Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Lake City is a far-northeast neighborhood organized around Lake City Way NE, the historic primary route to Bothell and points north. Predominantly mid-century single-family homes and apartment buildings, with the Lake City Library and Civic Core area at 125th and 28th.
Four categories moved in Lake City this September, two one-month below-trend signals and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is downward: no category registered an above-trend spike, and the signals that did surface were concentrated in property crime falling further, not rising. Theft from vehicle appears twice in the top signals, once as a single-month drop and once as a multi-month sustained shift, suggesting the decline there is structural rather than a one-off.
Robbery is the strongest single-month signal, with 17 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 34 in the year before, a 50.0% reduction. Theft from vehicle has fallen 31.8% year-over-year, 221 incidents versus 324. Motor vehicle theft is also down 33.5% over the same window, and aggravated assault is down 22.1%, though neither crossed the anomaly threshold this month. Burglary is the one category running against the grain, up 14.0% year-over-year at 203 incidents versus 178, and worth watching as the rest of the neighborhood trends down.
Notable signals 2
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 17 incidents — about 49% below the 33 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 221 incidents — about 36% below the 347 average from prior years.
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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 221, down 32% from 324 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 123, down 34% from 185 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 Lake City compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Lake City, 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.