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 August, three one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The month's shape is broadly downward across property crime: theft from vehicle, vandalism, and burglary all ran below trend in August, while the 12-month picture confirms the same direction has held long enough to qualify as a structural change.
Theft from vehicle is the strongest signal, with 388 incidents over the current 12 months against 489 in the prior year, down 20.7%. Vandalism and burglary follow the same pattern: vandalism at 218 vs. 279 prior-year incidents, down 21.9%, and burglary at 252 vs. 305, down 17.4%. Other larceny is the one category running the other direction, up 6.7% over the same window, but nothing else crossed the anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 3
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 388 incidents — about 40% below the 645 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 218 incidents — about 24% below the 285 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 252 incidents — about 33% below the 376 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 248, down 28% from 343 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 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 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.”
Northgate
371 incidents over the past 12 months — 17 below Northwest's 388.
Open page →Rainier Valley
406 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 above Northwest's 388.
Open page →Beacon Hill
342 incidents over the past 12 months — 46 below Northwest's 388.
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.