Downtown Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Downtown is the central business district of Los Angeles, organized around the Civic Center, the Financial District around Bunker Hill, and the historic core along Broadway and Spring. Anchored by Union Station, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Grand Central Market, and the Crypto.com Arena/LA Live entertainment complex.
Five categories moved in Downtown Los Angeles this August, a mix of one spike, one below-trend drop, and three sustained structural shifts. The shape of the month is split: property crime is rising on a multi-year basis across several categories, while burglary is the lone area running below its recent pace.
Vandalism registered the strongest single-month signal, with 1,976 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 1,787 in the prior year, a 10.6% rise that made this month's count the outlier in an otherwise gradual climb. Theft from vehicle and other larceny are the structural story: theft from vehicle is up 31.3% year over year (2,708 vs. 2,062), and other larceny is up 64.5% (2,675 vs. 1,626), both sustained shifts rather than single-month noise. Burglary moved the other direction, down 17.2% over the same 12-month window, the one category where volume has pulled back meaningfully.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 1,976 incidents — about 36% above the 1453 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 496 incidents — about 34% below the 748 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 2,675, up 65% from 1,626 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 2,708, up 31% from 2,062 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 1,118, up 26% from 885 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
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 Downtown 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.”
Hollywood
784 incidents over the past 12 months — 1192 below Downtown's 1,976.
Open page →Koreatown
749 incidents over the past 12 months — 1227 below Downtown's 1,976.
Open page →Westlake
683 incidents over the past 12 months — 1293 below Downtown's 1,976.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Downtowndoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Downtown's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 Downtown, 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.