Seward Park Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
Seward Park is a Lake Washington shoreline neighborhood centered on the Bailey Peninsula and the 300-acre Seward Park itself. Predominantly single-family homes on tree-lined streets, with the park's old-growth forest and waterfront loop as the dominant geographic feature.
April 2026 was a structurally quiet month in Seward Park. No tracked category generated a notable signal this period — the one zero-event observation for Homicide reflects an absence of activity rather than an anomaly worth separating from the baseline. The month's story is less about any single move and more about a broad, sustained decline across every major property crime category.
Theft from Vehicle is down 30.1% over the trailing 12 months (86 incidents vs. 123 the prior year), Burglary is down 39.5% (23 vs. 38), and Motor Vehicle Theft is down 40.5% (25 vs. 42). Aggravated Assault dropped 40.0% year-over-year on small absolute counts — 3 incidents against a prior-year total of 5. Every category in the tracked set is running below its prior-12-month level, with Vandalism the smallest mover at -7.1%.
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 April 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Seward Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month homicide 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 homicide levels.”
Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Seward Park has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (7 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 57.1% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 7 | 57.1% |
| Vandalism | 4 | — too few |
| Burglary | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Seward Park's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 1 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Seattle); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Seward Park, 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.