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 below trend in Carthay this April — motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle, both running well under their historical baselines. The rest of the tracked categories were within range, making this a narrow but meaningful month: two sustained drops against an otherwise stable backdrop.
Motor vehicle theft is down 78.9% against the prior 12 months, 4 incidents over the current 12-month window against 19 in the year before — and against a baseline mean of 25.34, the current pace is less than a sixth of the longer-run average. Theft from vehicle tells a similar story: 6 incidents in the current 12 months versus 30 in the prior year, a 80.0% decline. Burglary is the one category moving the other way, up 33.3% year-over-year (16 vs. 12), though it did not cross the anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 4 incidents — about 84% below the 25 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 6 incidents — about 88% below the 50 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 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
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.”
Hansen Dam
4 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Carthay's 4.
Open page →Sepulveda Basin
5 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Carthay's 4.
Open page →Bel-Air
6 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Carthay's 4.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Carthay has spiked theft from vehicle historically (10 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Theft from vehicle | 10 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 10 | 0% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 3 | — too few |
| Burglary | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Carthay's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 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
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.