Los Angeles Crime Rate — 2024 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 2024.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies that defined the year.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2024 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 2025
Patterns we expect to keep moving.
The big picture
Los Angeles closed 2024 with 146,256 bucketed incidents — down 3.6% against 151,660 the year before. 3,024 tracked signals were raised across 12 briefings — 1132 spikes, 1779 drops + sustained shifts, and 17 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 2024reader to. Recurring (neighborhood, category) stories collapse to one card so the list isn't five copies of the same spike.
Silver Lake · Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 755 incidents — about 254% above the 213 average from prior years.
Woodland Hills · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 404 incidents — about 99% above the 203 average from prior years.
Porter Ranch · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 74 incidents — about 164% above the 28 average from prior years.
West Hills · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 178 incidents — about 135% above the 76 average from prior years.
West Hills · Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 507 incidents — about 113% above the 238 average from prior years.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2024 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 0 monthly point-estimate forecasts issued for 2024, 0 (—) 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 2025
3 distinct patterns from 2024we expect to keep moving — drawn from the year's recurring sustained signals, not the single-month spikes already covered above.
- 01
Sepulveda Basin · theft from vehicle
The past 12 months saw 116 incidents — about 215% above the 37 average from prior years. Surfaced in 8 of 2024's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 02
Granada Hills · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 252 incidents — about 127% above the 111 average from prior years. Surfaced in 7 of 2024's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 03
Encino · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 302 incidents — about 112% above the 143 average from prior years. Surfaced in 5 of 2024's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
Cite as: Public Analyst.ai, “Los Angeles — 2024in review,” auto-generated annual report. Permanent URL: /los-angeles/2024/year-in-review.