Los Angeles 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
Los Angeles closed 2025 with 107,932 bucketed incidents — down 26.2% against 146,257 the year before. 5,736 tracked signals were raised across 12 briefings — 720 spikes, 4889 drops + sustained shifts, and 31 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.
Porter Ranch · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 98 incidents — about 255% above the 28 average from prior years.
Northridge · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 455 incidents — about 100% above the 227 average from prior years.
West Hills · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 238 incidents — about 208% above the 77 average from prior years.
Woodland Hills · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 411 incidents — about 102% above the 204 average from prior years.
Encino · Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 381 incidents — about 172% above the 140 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, 44 (37%) 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
Winnetka · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 263 incidents — about 80% above the 146 average from prior years. Surfaced in 12 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 02
Chatsworth · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 325 incidents — about 124% above the 145 average from prior years. Surfaced in 9 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 03
Granada Hills · vandalism
The past 12 months saw 259 incidents — about 131% above the 112 average from prior years. Surfaced in 7 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
Cite as: Public Analyst.ai, “Los Angeles — 2025in review,” auto-generated annual report. Permanent URL: /los-angeles/2025/year-in-review.