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.
Eleven signals across Boyle Heights in April 2026 — six one-month below-trend drops and five sustained multi-month structural shifts. No spikes and no rare events. The shape of the month is broad and consistently downward, spanning both violent and property categories.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signal list: the trailing 12-month total is 395, down 40.6% against the prior year's 665. Theft from vehicle and robbery both ran below trend as well — theft from vehicle is down 43.8% year-over-year (269 vs. 479), robbery down 20.5% (132 vs. 166). The five sustained-shift signals suggest these aren't single-month fluctuations; other larceny, for instance, is down 61.9% over the trailing 12 months compared to the year prior.
Notable signals 6
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 395 incidents — about 50% below the 792 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 269 incidents — about 51% below the 544 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 132 incidents — about 37% below the 208 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 149 incidents — about 45% below the 270 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 384 incidents — about 26% below the 521 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 355 incidents — about 15% below the 417 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 299, down 62% from 784 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 395, down 41% from 665 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 269, down 44% from 479 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 384, down 27% from 526 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 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
391 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Boyle Heights's 395.
Open page →Broadway-Manchester
358 incidents over the past 12 months — 37 below Boyle Heights's 395.
Open page →Hollywood
436 incidents over the past 12 months — 41 above Boyle Heights's 395.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Boyle Heights has spiked sexual assault historically (9 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 25 | 96% |
| Robbery | 9 | 44.4% |
| Sexual assault | 9 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 8 | 100% |
| Arson | 6 | 0% |
| Burglary | 4 | — too few |
| Theft from vehicle | 4 | — too few |
| Homicide | 2 | — too few |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Boyle Heights'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 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
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.