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.
August 2026 produced no tracked signals in North Central. No category crossed an anomaly threshold this month, making this a genuinely quiet briefing with nothing to distinguish from seasonal noise.
The 12-month picture is more active. Robbery is up 37.5% against the prior year, 44 incidents vs. 32, and burglary rose 21.3%, 586 vs. 483. On the other side, vandalism is down 20.8% over the same window (282 vs. 356), motor vehicle theft is down 16.1% (359 vs. 428), and aggravated assault fell 13.3% to 52 from 60. Theft from vehicle and other larceny were essentially flat. The structural mix is split: property crime categories are pulling in opposite directions, with burglary and theft from vehicle trending up while vandalism and motor vehicle theft continue a multi-year decline.
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
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
575 incidents over the past 12 months — 23 above North Central's 552.
Open page →Central Area
588 incidents over the past 12 months — 36 above North Central's 552.
Open page →Queen Anne
614 incidents over the past 12 months — 62 above North Central's 552.
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.