Northwest Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Northwest Seattle covers Crown Hill, Greenwood, Bitter Lake, and Broadview north of the Ship Canal and west of Aurora Avenue. Predominantly single-family residential along Greenwood Avenue and 15th Avenue NW; anchored by Carkeek Park on Puget Sound.
Four categories moved in Northwest this September, split evenly between single-month below-trend signals and longer structural shifts. Theft from vehicle and vandalism each ran below trend for the month, while aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft are showing multi-month sustained declines, not just a quiet stretch.
Aggravated assault is down 28.6% over the trailing 12 months, 100 incidents against 140 the year before. Theft from vehicle has fallen to 380 incidents in the current 12-month window, from 483 prior, a 21.3% reduction. Vandalism dropped 23.2% year over year as well. Other larceny is the one category running in the other direction, up 4.8% against the prior year, and everything else, including robbery, held roughly flat.
Notable signals 2
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 380 incidents — about 41% below the 643 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 215 incidents — about 25% below the 285 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 237, down 26% from 320 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 100, down 29% from 140 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 Northwest compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Beacon Hill
378 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Northwest's 380.
Open page →Northgate
386 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Northwest's 380.
Open page →Rainier Valley
438 incidents over the past 12 months — 58 above Northwest's 380.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Northwest, 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.