Boyle Heights Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Boyle Heights is an Eastside neighborhood across the Los Angeles River from Downtown, organized around the Cesar Chavez Avenue and First Street commercial corridors. Anchored by Mariachi Plaza, the Hollenbeck Park lake, and the Metro E Line's Mariachi Plaza, Soto, and Indiana stations.
Eight categories moved in Boyle Heights this March — five ran below their short-term trend and three registered as sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is a broad, multi-category decline across both violent and property crime, not a single outlier pulling the numbers down.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest single signal: 396 incidents in the current 12 months against a baseline of 794.88, and down 42.9% against the prior year's 694. Theft from vehicle and burglary also ran below trend this month, consistent with a pattern that includes sustained shifts in Other Larceny (down 63.0%, 303 vs 818) and Vandalism (down 24.3%, 406 vs 536). The three sustained-shift signals indicate these are not one-month dips — the lower volumes have persisted long enough to constitute a structural change from the prior 12-month baseline.
Notable signals 5
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 396 incidents — about 50% below the 795 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 282 incidents — about 48% below the 545 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 151 incidents — about 45% below the 272 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 138 incidents — about 34% below the 209 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 406 incidents — about 22% below the 521 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 303, down 63% from 818 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 396, down 43% from 694 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 282, down 43% from 497 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 March 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 Boyle Heights compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Van Nuys
413 incidents over the past 12 months — 17 above Boyle Heights's 396.
Open page →Broadway-Manchester
344 incidents over the past 12 months — 52 below Boyle Heights's 396.
Open page →Koreatown
454 incidents over the past 12 months — 58 above Boyle Heights's 396.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Boyle Heights, 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
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, 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.