Chinatown Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Chinatown is a Central LA neighborhood north of Downtown, organized around the Broadway and Hill Street commercial corridors. Anchored by the Central Plaza, the historic Mandarin Plaza, the Metro L Line's Chinatown station, and the Los Angeles State Historic Park to the east.
Four categories moved in Chinatown this August briefing, and three of them were spikes. Other larceny, vandalism, and motor vehicle theft all registered above-trend signals in the current 12-month window, with a sustained structural shift rounding out the picture. The month's shape is an upward one across property crime, concentrated in theft and damage categories.
Other larceny is the strongest signal: 316 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 236 in the prior year, a 33.9% increase. Motor vehicle theft shows a similar structural move, 140 current versus 108 prior, up 29.6%. Vandalism is up 11.4%, at 224 incidents against 201. By contrast, the violent categories held mostly in check: robbery down 9.7%, aggravated assault down 4.9%, and sexual assault down 15.8%, with arson down 40.0% over the same window. The property side of the ledger carried the month.
Notable signals 3
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 316 incidents — about 148% above the 127 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 224 incidents — about 113% above the 105 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 140 incidents — about 88% above the 75 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 316, up 34% from 236 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 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 Chinatown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Westwood
308 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Chinatown's 316.
Open page →San Pedro
326 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 above Chinatown's 316.
Open page →Canoga Park
303 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 below Chinatown's 316.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Chinatowndoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 2 | — too few |
| Other larceny | 2 | — too few |
| Vandalism | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Chinatown's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 Chinatown, 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.