West Seattle Crime Rate Trends — Seattle
West Seattle is the peninsula across the Duwamish River from downtown, including Alki, Admiral, the Junction, Fairmount, Gatewood, and Fauntleroy. Anchored by the West Seattle Junction commercial strip at California and Alaska, the Alki Beach waterfront, and the West Seattle Bridge that links it to the rest of the city.
Four signals surfaced in West Seattle this April — two one-month below-trend readings and two sustained structural shifts, with one zero-event category rounding out the mix. The dominant shape is downward, particularly across vehicle-related property crime, where both single-month and multi-year patterns point in the same direction.
Theft from vehicle is the clearest mover: the trailing 12-month total sits at 438 incidents, down 32.2% against the prior year's 646, and well below the multi-year baseline of 711.55. Burglary also ran below trend this month, though at a smaller scale — 276 incidents over the current 12 months versus 268 in the prior period, a 3.0% uptick that puts it slightly above last year while still registering a single-month drop. Robbery and motor vehicle theft show the steepest year-over-year declines in the bucket summary — down 27.8% and 37.8%, respectively — but neither crossed the signal threshold this month, meaning everything outside the four tracked signals held within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 438 incidents — about 38% below the 712 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 276 incidents — about 21% below the 347 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 438, down 32% from 646 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 257, down 38% from 413 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 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
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 West Seattle 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.”
Northwest
426 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below West Seattle's 438.
Open page →Rainier Valley
456 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 above West Seattle's 438.
Open page →Cascade
465 incidents over the past 12 months — 27 above West Seattle's 438.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When West Seattle has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (6 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 33.3% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Robbery | 8 | 0% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 6 | 33.3% |
| Vandalism | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows West Seattle's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 2 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 West Seattle, 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.