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.
March 2026 was a quiet month for North Central — no tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count sits at zero. The more meaningful story is in the 12-month structure beneath that calm surface, where the categories are moving in two distinct directions.
Violent crime is down broadly: robbery fell 36.0% against the prior 12 months (32 incidents vs. 50), and vandalism is off 22.3% (289 vs. 372). Property crime is moving the other way — burglary is up 20.7% over the same window (600 vs. 497), other larceny up 11.7% (620 vs. 555), and theft from vehicle up 6.4% (895 vs. 841). No single month produced a breakout signal, but the 12-month split between falling violent crime and rising property crime is the pattern that defines North Central right now.
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 March 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 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.”
Rainier Valley
629 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above North Central's 620.
Open page →Central Area
640 incidents over the past 12 months — 20 above North Central's 620.
Open page →Northeast
654 incidents over the past 12 months — 34 above North Central's 620.
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 SFPD's open dataset, 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.