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.
Five categories moved in Chinatown this July, three one-month spikes and two sustained multi-month shifts. The spikes cluster in property crime: other larceny, vandalism, and motor vehicle theft all ran above trend in the same month, a convergence that gives this briefing a distinct upward lean rather than isolated noise.
Other larceny is the strongest signal, with 304 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 224 in the prior year, up 35.7%. Motor vehicle theft is moving even faster on a percentage basis, 138 incidents versus 93 a year ago, up 48.4%. Vandalism rose 14.4% year-over-year (223 vs. 195), and the two sustained-shift signals indicate these are not one-month anomalies: the property crime category mix in Chinatown has been structurally elevated for several months. Violent categories held relatively steady: aggravated assault was flat at 145 incidents, robbery edged down 6.7%, and sexual assault fell 20.0%.
Notable signals 3
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 304 incidents — about 142% above the 125 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 223 incidents — about 115% above the 104 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 138 incidents — about 86% above the 74 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 304, up 36% from 224 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 138, up 48% from 93 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 July 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.”
Canoga Park
300 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Chinatown's 304.
Open page →Westwood
310 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Chinatown's 304.
Open page →Vermont-Slauson
296 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Chinatown's 304.
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 | 1 | — too few |
| Other larceny | 1 | — too few |
| Vandalism | 1 | — 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.