Los Angeles · April 2026 briefing

Los Angeles Crime Rate Trends

Data sourced from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Open Data portal and analyzed by Public Analyst.ai: 114 neighborhoods, 10 incident categories, twelve months of trailing comparison. Browse the rankings, scan the multi-year trends, or open a neighborhood-level breakdown.

Read methodologyUPDATED · AS OF 2026-04
554
tracked signals this month — across spikes, drops, sustained shifts, rare events.
-27.4%
overall city incident volume vs. trailing 12-month avg.
114
neighborhoods covered. Each gets its own page.
10
incident categories tracked, NIBRS-aligned.

Tarzana other larceny is the top signal in April 2026 — an above-trend move that tops the rankings for the first time this month. The category shows up across multiple neighborhoods in the top five, with Studio City, Beverlywood, and Woodland Hills all registering fresh spikes in the same bucket, making other larceny the defining pattern of this briefing.

Citywide volume is down 27.4% against the prior 12 months — 98,797 incidents against 136,047 in the year before. That decline is the structural backdrop. The signal mix, however, skews toward sustained below-trend movement: 246 sustained-shift signals and 289 below-trend signals against just 9 fresh spikes across 114 neighborhoods. Windsor Square vandalism is the one fresh spike outside the other-larceny cluster, standing apart from the dominant category.

The citywide decline is substantial and has been running for at least 12 months at this scale. The other-larceny concentration across Tarzana, Studio City, Beverlywood, and Woodland Hills is new this month and worth tracking — if it persists into May, it shifts from a single-month cluster to a sustained pattern. The structural downtrend otherwise holds.

WHAT TO READ NEXT
Data note · LA feed change

Why these numbers are below LAPD's headline totals

Counts from March 2024 onwardrun roughly 10 to 20 percent below LAPD's command-staff totals citywide. LAPD's legacy crime feed froze after a late-2024 cyber incident, and the replacement NIBRS feed has been shipping fewer rows than LAPD's own statistics show. The shortfall is most visible in homicide and in dense south-LA neighborhoods, because the new feed lacks coordinates and resolves location through reporting districts. Trend direction is still meaningful; absolute levels are not directly comparable to LAPD's headline figures.

Read the full LA caveat in methodology →

Direct answers

Los Angeles Crime Frequently Asked Questions

Trailing 12 months vs the prior 12 months, computed from the same NIBRS-aligned categories used everywhere else on the page. Updated each April 2026 briefing.

Is crime in Los Angeles down?

Yes — citywide incident volume is 27.4% lower than the prior 12 months.

Across the trailing 12-month window we tracked 98,797 incidents in NIBRS-aligned categories, compared to 136,047 in the year before — down 37,250 incidents.

Is violent crime in Los Angeles down?

Yes — homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are down 18.8% combined in the trailing 12 months.

That's 20,681 violent incidents in the past year against 25,455 in the prior year. See the by-category section below for the per-bucket breakdown.

Is property crime in Los Angeles down?

Yes — burglary, theft from vehicle, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson are down 30.7% combined in the trailing 12 months.

That's 60,421 property incidents in the past year against 87,243 in the prior year.

What are the safest neighborhoods to stay in Los Angeles?

  1. Harvard Park0.0 incidents per 1,000 residents
  2. Pacific Palisades6.5 incidents per 1,000 residents
  3. San Pedro7.5 incidents per 1,000 residents

The three safest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, ranked by trailing-12-month incidents per 1,000 residents.

Computed as NIBRS-aligned trailing-12-month incident totals divided by the latest ACS 5-year residential population, expressed per 1,000 residents. Restricted to neighborhoods with at least 1,000 residents so park-only and industrial geographies — where visitor populations are not reflected in the residential denominator — are excluded.

Which neighborhood in Los Angeles saw the biggest crime drop?

San Pedro — 61.7% fewer incidents than the prior 12 months.

San Pedro logged 603 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 1,573 the year before.

Which neighborhood in Los Angeles saw the biggest crime increase?

Beverlywood — 28.3% more incidents than the prior 12 months.

Beverlywood logged 136 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 106 the year before.

City profile

The denominators behind the numbers

SOURCES · US CENSUS ACS 2024 · LA OPEN DATA · LAPD
Geography
Land area469.5 mi²
Water area33.6 mi²
CoastlinePacific (≈ 75 mi)
Elevation0–5,074 ft
LAPD geographic areas21
Neighborhoods114 (analysis units)

Sprawling Mediterranean-climate city laid out across the LA Basin, San Fernando Valley, the Santa Monica Mountains, and a southern peninsula running to the Port of LA at San Pedro. Neighborhood boundaries follow the LA Times' Mapping LA project (114 polygons) — the historical analytical standard for the city. Major freeways (101, 405, 110, 10, 5) and the Santa Monica Mountains define most neighborhood-cluster boundaries.

Population
3,844,958
Density~8,189 / mi²
Median age38.2
Households~1.44M
Avg HH size2.81

ACS 2024 5-year estimates, county-level (Los Angeles County). LA County is much broader than the City of Los Angeles — county-level medians (rent, home value, household income, age) are county-wide, not city-only. Per-tract counts (population, households, housing units) sum only the ~1,100 tracts whose interior point falls inside city limits.

Housing
Units~1.55M
Median rent$1,954
Median home value$834,200
Vacancy7.4%
Tenure
Renter 64%Owner 36%
Stock
SFH 42%2–4 unit 9%5+ unit 49%
Economy & people
Median HH income$90,112
Poverty rate16.5%
Unemployment8.2%
Bachelor's+38.5%
Foreign-born35.7%
Age distribution
<18 19%18–34 27%35–64 39%65+ 14%

City-level only. We deliberately do not juxtapose these with neighborhood-level crime data — see the methodology for why.

Built environment
Street miles~28,000
Parks (acres)~16,000
Metro rail stations108
Walk score69 (somewhat walkable)

Largely car-oriented, low-density single-family fabric across most of the city, with high-rise cores in Downtown, Century City, Westwood, and along the Wilshire corridor (Koreatown, Mid-Wilshire). The Metro Rail B/D Line subway and the A/E/K light-rail lines shape transit travel for the central and Westside neighborhoods; the San Fernando Valley relies on the G Line bus rapid transit and freeways.

Policing context
LAPD sworn officers~8,800
Officers / 10K res.~22
911 calls / yr~3.5M
Open data lag≈ 14 days (settled)

LAPD now publishes through three feeds — a frozen UCR-coded feed (2nrs-mtv8) that carries 2020 through 2024-02 history, and two NIBRS-coded feeds (y8y3-fqfu for 2024-03 through 2025-12, then k7nn-b2ep for 2026 onward). Our ingest stitches them by date. The NIBRS feeds don't carry lat/lng, so neighborhood is resolved via a hand-built LAPD-RD → Mapping-LA crosswalk: 1,129 of 1,135 reporting districts mapped, with the remaining 6 falling outside city limits. Approximately ~14-day reporting lag on the NIBRS side per LAPD docs.

Interactive map

Every neighborhood, color-coded

CLICK A NEIGHBORHOOD →
Category
Layer
Window
RAW COUNT · 1Y
03,3806,760
Rankings

Largest moves this month

RANKED BY ANOMALY STRENGTH
#NeighborhoodCategoryMoMYoY 12movs baseline90-day trendSignal
01TarzanaOther Larceny-45%+58%+94%SPIKE
02Windsor SquareVandalism-50%+37%+93%SPIKE
03Studio CityOther Larceny-21%+34%+49%SPIKE
04BeverlywoodOther Larceny0%+100%+167%SPIKE
05Woodland HillsOther Larceny-20%+23%+69%SPIKE
06Canoga ParkVandalism-14%+7%+40%SPIKE
07Chesterfield SquareTheft from Vehicle-14%+12%+48%SPIKE
08Hollywood HillsOther Larceny-13%+3%+23%SPIKE
09Chesterfield SquareMotor Vehicle Theft-13%+49%+34%SPIKE
10Chatsworth ReservoirRobberySTREAK BREAK
11Chatsworth ReservoirTheft from VehicleSTREAK BREAK
12Green MeadowsMotor Vehicle Theft-55%-50%-52%DROP
Showing top 12 of 20 (neighborhood × category) cells with tracked signals.
Multi-year trends

The long arc — eight years of monthly counts

SELECT A CATEGORY ↓
013263951201820192020202120222023202420252026monthly12-mo rolling mean
Latest 12mo187
YoY 12mo-6%
5-year change-52%
Window change
Peak (12mo avg)35 · Aug '21
Trough (12mo avg)16 · Apr '26
ALL CATEGORIES · 8-YEAR ARC · 12-MO ROLLING MEAN
2018 ─────────────────── 2026
When does it happen?

Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality

Distribution of bucketed incidents citywide 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.

HOUR OF DAY · ALL CATEGORIES
030,32960,65712am6am12pm6pm11pm

Hour 0 is mildly inflated by reports without a known time defaulting to midnight — see methodology.

DAY OF WEEK · ALL CATEGORIES
073,001146,002MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
MONTH OF YEAR · ALL CATEGORIES
043,24786,494JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Browse

All 114 Los Angeles neighborhoods

Crime rate trends and April 2026 briefings for every tracked neighborhood. Alphabetical.

Methodology

How We Calculate Los Angeles Crime Trends

Open about how we define spikes, what we exclude as noise, where the data comes from, and how often the model is wrong.

# anomaly rule — spike
flag = (z >= 2.5) AND (current_12mo >= 20) AND (current_6mo above sustained band)
where z = (current_12mo − μ_baseline) / σ_baseline
# exclusions (excerpt)
· simple assault (varies by reporting practice)
· drug offenses (reflect policing policy)
· admin records, weapons-possession, fraud
# 2025 backtest (citywide)
7 of 10 categories ≥ 90% coverage. see table →