Rainier Valley Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Rainier Valley runs along Rainier Avenue South and the Link light rail line through southeast Seattle, including Columbia City, Hillman City, Brighton, and Rainier Beach. One of the most diverse parts of the city, anchored by the Columbia City landmark district, Othello and Rainier Beach light rail stations, and Lake Washington's Seward Park to the east.
September 2026 was a quiet month for Rainier Valley. No tracked category produced a notable signal, and the month's data is best read as a continuation of the structural trends already in place across the neighborhood rather than any fresh move.
The dominant pattern across the trailing 12 months is a broad pullback in property crime. Theft from vehicle is down 23.8% against the prior year, 438 incidents vs 575. Other larceny is down 20.1% (601 vs 752) and burglary down 19.7% (322 vs 401). Violent crime categories held roughly flat: aggravated assault fell 4.6% to 166 incidents, while robbery edged up 1.9% to 106. Vandalism and arson each ticked modestly higher on a 12-month basis but produced no single-month signals this period.
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 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 Rainier Valley 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.”
Queen Anne
596 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Rainier Valley's 601.
Open page →Ballard
631 incidents over the past 12 months — 30 above Rainier Valley's 601.
Open page →Central Area
552 incidents over the past 12 months — 49 below Rainier Valley's 601.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Rainier Valley, 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.