Seattle 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
Seattle closed 2025 with 48,311 bucketed incidents — down 10.7% against 54,088 the year before. 514 tracked signals were raised across 12 briefings — 23 spikes, 342 drops + sustained shifts, and 5 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.
Downtown · Theft from Vehicle
The past year logged 2,137 incidents — up 62% from 1,320 the year before.
Capitol Hill · Other Larceny
The past year logged 1,160 incidents — up 58% from 736 the year before.
Lake City · Motor Vehicle Theft
The past year logged 155 incidents — down 58% from 366 the year before.
Rainier Valley · Motor Vehicle Theft
The past year logged 455 incidents — down 41% from 769 the year before.
Northeast · Motor Vehicle Theft
The past year logged 315 incidents — down 44% from 567 the year before.
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, 88 (73%) 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
Central Area · motor vehicle theft
The past year logged 383 incidents — down 40% from 643 the year before. Surfaced in 9 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 02
Delridge · motor vehicle theft
The past year logged 403 incidents — down 39% from 657 the year before. Surfaced in 9 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 03
West Seattle · motor vehicle theft
The past year logged 391 incidents — down 39% from 641 the year before. Surfaced in 12 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
Cite as: Public Analyst.ai, “Seattle — 2025in review,” auto-generated annual report. Permanent URL: /seattle/2025/year-in-review.