Arleta Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Arleta is a northeast San Fernando Valley neighborhood between Pacoima and Panorama City, organized around Branford Street and Woodman Avenue. Predominantly mid-century single-family homes on a tight grid, anchored by Branford Park and the Hansen Dam Channel.
Six categories moved in Arleta this April — three one-month below-trend signals and three sustained structural shifts, all pointing in the same direction. The pattern is a broad, multi-year contraction across both violent and property crime, not a single quiet category dragging the average down.
Theft from vehicle leads the signals: the current 12-month total is 35, against a multi-year baseline mean of 137.02 and a prior-year count of 109 — down 67.9% year-over-year. Motor vehicle theft is similarly compressed, 33 incidents against 141 the prior year, a 76.6% decline. Vandalism rounds out the top three below-trend signals, down 48.8% to 41 incidents from 80. Everything else tracked — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny, sexual assault — is also running below prior-year levels, with none registering a fresh spike.
Notable signals 3
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 35 incidents — about 74% below the 137 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 33 incidents — about 76% below the 139 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 41 incidents — about 39% below the 67 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 33, down 77% from 141 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 35, down 68% from 109 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 41, down 49% from 80 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through April 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Arleta compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable theft from vehicle levels.”
Pacific Palisades
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Arleta's 35.
Open page →Playa del Rey
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Arleta's 35.
Open page →San Pedro
37 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Arleta's 35.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Arleta has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (15 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 73.3% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 15 | 73.3% |
| Theft from vehicle | 6 | 0% |
Each row shows Arleta's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Los Angeles); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Arleta, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood 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.
How we built this page
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.
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from LAPD's open feed on the LA City Open Data portal — the NIBRS-coded feed from 2024-03 onward with UCR backfill to 2020. Mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories and aggregated to neighborhood × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.