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.
West Seattle had four signals in March 2026 — two one-month below-trend readings and two sustained structural shifts, with one zero-event category — the overall shape is downward across property crime, broadly and persistently.
Burglary and Theft from Vehicle both ran below trend this month; Theft from Vehicle also registers as a sustained shift, meaning the decline has held across multiple months rather than appearing as a single quiet period. The 12-month Theft from Vehicle total stands at 435, down 34.4% from 663 the prior year. Motor Vehicle Theft shows a similar pattern at the 12-month level — 275 incidents against 433 the year before, a 36.5% decline — and sits within the same structural downward move, even without a dedicated signal this month. Everything else tracked was within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 275 incidents — about 21% below the 348 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 435 incidents — about 39% below the 712 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 435, down 34% from 663 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 275, down 37% from 433 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 March 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.”
Northwest
272 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below West Seattle's 275.
Open page →Greater Duwamish
283 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above West Seattle's 275.
Open page →Northgate
293 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 above West Seattle's 275.
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 SFPD's open dataset, 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.