Bel-Air Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Bel-Air is a Westside hillside neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains, organized around Bel Air Road and Stone Canyon Road. Predominantly large estate homes on winding canyon streets; anchored by the Bel-Air Country Club and the Stone Canyon Reservoir.
Two signals surfaced in Bel-Air this August: one single-month below-trend reading in burglary, and one sustained structural shift in the same category pointing to a longer-term decline. The month was narrow in breadth, with only one category moving, but the combination of a one-month drop alongside a multi-year shift makes the burglary story the dominant feature of this briefing.
Burglary is the clearest mover. The trailing 12 months produced 27 incidents against 60 in the prior year, a 55.0% reduction. Vandalism and aggravated assault have also pulled back sharply over the same window, down 53.1% and 50.0% respectively, while theft from vehicle fell 47.1% to 9 incidents. Every tracked category is running below its prior-year level, and none registered a spike or rare-event signal this month.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 27 incidents — about 38% below the 44 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 27, down 55% from 60 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 August 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Vandalism
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
How Bel-Air compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Bel-Air, 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.