North Central Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
North Central covers the Wallingford, Fremont, and Phinney Ridge corridor north of Lake Union and west of I-5. Organized around the 45th Street and Stone Way commercial strips; anchored by Gas Works Park, the Woodland Park Zoo, and the Fremont Bridge.
North Central's June 2026 briefing has a narrow footprint: one tracked signal, a sustained structural shift in burglary running upward across the trailing 12 months. This isn't a single noisy month — a sustained shift reflects a multi-month pattern baked into the 12-month totals, not a one-time blip. Every other tracked category fell within normal range.
Burglary is up 26.7% against the prior 12 months — 613 incidents versus 484 — the only category to clear the anomaly threshold. The directional picture across the rest of the neighborhood is mixed but unremarkable: vandalism is down 23.2% (284 vs 370), aggravated assault is down 22.2% (49 vs 63), and motor vehicle theft is down 8.2% (390 vs 425), while robbery, theft from vehicle, and other larceny each edged modestly higher. None of those moves generated a signal. The burglary structural shift is the one category in North Central that warrants continued watching.
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.
- Burglary is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 613, up 27% from 484 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through June 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 North Central compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Queen Anne
536 incidents over the past 12 months — 77 below North Central's 613.
Open page →Ballard
527 incidents over the past 12 months — 86 below North Central's 613.
Open page →Capitol Hill
744 incidents over the past 12 months — 131 above North Central's 613.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for North Central, 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.