Carthay Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Carthay is a Mid-Wilshire neighborhood between La Cienega and Fairfax that contains the Carthay Circle, Carthay Square, and South Carthay HPOZ-protected historic districts. Predominantly Spanish Colonial Revival single-family homes from the 1920s and '30s, with the Carthay Center commercial strip on San Vicente.
Two categories moved in Carthay in March 2026, both below trend. The month's shape is narrow and uniformly downward — motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle each registered drops, with nothing else crossing the anomaly threshold.
Motor vehicle theft stands out as the stronger of the two signals: the trailing 12-month total is 5, against a prior-year count of 18 — a 72.2% decline year-over-year. Theft from vehicle tells a similar story, falling from 32 to 7 incidents over the same period, down 78.1%. Every other tracked category — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny, vandalism — came in within its expected range, leaving the two vehicle-related categories as the defining pattern of the month.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 5 incidents — about 80% below the 25 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 7 incidents — about 86% below the 51 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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
How Carthay 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.”
Bel-Air
6 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Carthay's 5.
Open page →Sepulveda Basin
4 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Carthay's 5.
Open page →Beverly Crest
7 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Carthay's 5.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Carthay, 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.