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.
Two categories registered signals in West Seattle this September, a one-month below-trend move in burglary and a sustained multi-month structural shift downward in motor vehicle theft. The overall shape is quietly positive: the signals that moved both point in the same direction, and nothing spiked.
Motor vehicle theft is the more structurally significant of the two, down 35.3% over the trailing 12 months, 227 incidents against 351 in the prior year. Burglary's 12-month total of 254 is nearly flat year-over-year, up just 0.4%, but the single-month below-trend signal suggests the current pace is running short of its historical norm. Robbery and aggravated assault, both down meaningfully over the past year at -27.5% and -18.3% respectively, remained within range this month with no fresh signals.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 254 incidents — about 26% below the 342 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 227, down 35% from 351 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 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 West Seattle compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Greater Duwamish
251 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below West Seattle's 254.
Open page →Northgate
248 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below West Seattle's 254.
Open page →Delridge
242 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below West Seattle's 254.
Open page →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.