Oakland Crime Rate — 2025 in Review
A year of crime trends, summarized.
An annual companion to the monthly briefings: the anomalies that mattered, the structural shifts that emerged, and where the model got it right (or wrong). 12 briefings, condensed.
Seven chapters
The big picture
Citywide totals + monthly volume for 2025.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies that defined the year.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2025 totals.
Crime by neighborhood
Neighborhoods sorted by total tracked signals.
Crime forecast scorecard
Month-by-month forecast accuracy against actuals.
Methodology updates
Threshold + bucket changes that landed during the year.
What we'll watch in 2026
Patterns we expect to keep moving.
The big picture
Oakland closed 2025 with 29,614 bucketed incidents — down 22.0% against 37,963 the year before. 1,877 tracked signals were raised across 12 briefings — 53 spikes, 1820 drops + sustained shifts, and 4 rare-event / streak-break signals.
The monthly volume chart at right shows where the year was busy and where it was quiet, against the prior-year monthly average (dashed line). The categories that moved most are broken out below.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies we'd point a 2025reader to. Recurring (neighborhood, category) stories collapse to one card so the list isn't five copies of the same spike.
Adams Point · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 97 incidents — about 66% below the 286 average from prior years.
Glenview · Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 57% below the 47 average from prior years.
Seminary Park · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 42 incidents — about 41% below the 71 average from prior years.
Jack London Square · Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 345 incidents — about 69% below the 1115 average from prior years.
Financial District · Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 297 incidents — about 61% below the 754 average from prior years.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2025 total volume.
Crime by neighborhood
12 neighborhoods led the year by total signal count. The note column is the dominant story for that neighborhood — its biggest single signal.
Crime forecast scorecard
Of 120 monthly point-estimate forecasts issued for 2025, 91 (76%) landed inside their 95% prediction intervals. Below: month by month.
Per-bucket coverage, MAPE, and bias details live on the methodology page.
Methodology updates
Logged inline with the code that runs the model.
- VIEW DETAIL →
10-bucket NIBRS-aligned categories
Replaced an earlier 6-bucket scheme (which collapsed homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault into one “violent” bucket). Each bucket now maps to FBI UCR Part 1 / NIBRS Group A — the cross-city common denominator for adding new cities.
- VIEW DETAIL →
Sustained-shift Poisson rate-ratio test
Added a Poisson Z-test (|Z|>2.576, ratio differs by ≥25%) for sustained shifts between recent vs prior 12-mo windows — distinct from the spike/drop signals which compare against the multi-year baseline.
- VIEW DETAIL →
Prophet forecasts with low-count gating
Per-(neighborhood, bucket) forecasts now skip cells averaging <2 incidents/month over the trailing 24 months. Violent-bucket forecasts skip at the neighborhood level and surface via rare-event / streak-break signals instead.
What we'll watch in 2026
3 distinct patterns from 2025we expect to keep moving — drawn from the year's recurring sustained signals, not the single-month spikes already covered above.
- 01
Jack London Square · aggravated assault
The past 12 months saw 8 incidents — about 65% below the 23 average from prior years. Surfaced in 5 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 02
Elmhurst · homicide
The past 12 months saw 72 incidents — about 30% below the 103 average from prior years.
- 03
Brookfield Village · motor vehicle theft
The past 12 months saw 222 incidents — about 52% below the 465 average from prior years. Surfaced in 6 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
Cite as: Public Analyst.ai, “Oakland — 2025in review,” auto-generated annual report. Permanent URL: /oakland/2025/year-in-review.