University District Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
The University District is the neighborhood surrounding the University of Washington's main campus, organized around University Way NE ("the Ave") and the U District Link light rail station. Mixed student housing, mid-rise apartments, and the UW campus itself running east to Lake Washington.
June 2026 was a structurally quiet month in University District. No category crossed an anomaly threshold — the one signal on record is a zero-event for Homicide, meaning the category produced no incidents in the recent window. The broader shape of the month is defined by the 12-month trends rather than any single-month move.
Property crime is the dominant story in the trailing year: Theft from Vehicle is down 21.2% against the prior 12 months (523 vs. 664), Vandalism is down 22.4% (243 vs. 313), and Other Larceny is down 13.2% (447 vs. 515). Burglary follows the same direction at -10.3%. The one counter-trend is Aggravated Assault, which is up 17.9% over the same period (92 vs. 78) — a category to watch even in an otherwise broad-based property-crime 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 June 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 University District 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.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for University District, 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.