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.
April 2026 produced two signals in North Central, both structural: burglary and vandalism have each shifted at the 12-month level, moving in opposite directions. The shape is not a noisy single-month move — both register as sustained shifts, meaning the divergence has held long enough to separate from baseline.
Burglary is up 29.8% over the prior 12 months, 623 incidents against 480 the year before. Vandalism moved the other way, down 25.9% over the same window — 277 incidents against 374. Every other tracked category, from robbery to motor vehicle theft, ran within its normal range and produced no signals 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.
- Burglary is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 623, up 30% from 480 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 277, down 26% from 374 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 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 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
543 incidents over the past 12 months — 80 below North Central's 623.
Open page →Ballard
539 incidents over the past 12 months — 84 below North Central's 623.
Open page →Capitol Hill
724 incidents over the past 12 months — 101 above North Central's 623.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When North Central has spiked robbery historically (8 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Robbery | 8 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 5 | 100% |
Each row shows North Central's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 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.