Canoga Park Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Canoga Park is a western San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around Sherman Way and Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Predominantly mid-century single-family homes; bordered by Warner Center to the south and West Hills to the west.
Seven categories moved in Canoga Park this April — four as sustained structural shifts, two single-month drops, and one spike. The dominant pattern across the neighborhood is downward: motor vehicle theft, theft from vehicle, other larceny, and aggravated assault are all running well below their prior-year baselines on a 12-month basis. Vandalism is the exception, registering this month's lone above-trend signal against that otherwise broadly declining backdrop.
Theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft both ran below trend in April, continuing declines that now measure -38.8% and -54.8% year-over-year, respectively. Vandalism moved the other direction — 343 incidents over the current 12 months against 320 in the prior year, a 7.2% rise — and is the only category in Canoga Park currently tracking above its prior baseline. Every other tracked category, including aggravated assault (-30.8%, 119 vs. 172) and other larceny (-51.5%, 276 vs. 569), remained within or below their prior-year ranges.
Notable signals 3
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 343 incidents — about 40% above the 245 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 164 incidents — about 53% below the 347 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 109 incidents — about 56% below the 246 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 276, down 52% from 569 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 109, down 55% from 241 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 164, down 39% from 268 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 119, down 31% from 172 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 Canoga Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Sun Valley
323 incidents over the past 12 months — 20 below Canoga Park's 343.
Open page →Valley Glen
315 incidents over the past 12 months — 28 below Canoga Park's 343.
Open page →Boyle Heights
384 incidents over the past 12 months — 41 above Canoga Park's 343.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Canoga Park has spiked other larceny historically (15 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 20 | 90% |
| Other larceny | 15 | 100% |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
| Robbery | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Canoga Park'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 Canoga Park, 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.