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 July, a mix of one spike, one below-trend signal, and three sustained structural shifts. The dominant story is not a single quiet outlier but a property crime mix that has been reshaping over the trailing 12 months, with larceny and vehicle-related categories running well above where they sat the year before.
Vandalism registered the month's strongest single-month signal, with 1,937 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 1,780 the prior year, an 8.8% rise. Burglary moved the other direction, down 21.3% year-over-year to 492 from 625. The sustained-shift story is harder to dismiss: theft from vehicle is up 50.7% (2,781 vs. 1,845), other larceny is up 66.1% (2,548 vs. 1,534), and motor vehicle theft is up 40.5% (1,120 vs. 797), three categories that have been running above their prior-year pace long enough to read as structural, not seasonal noise.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 1,937 incidents — about 34% above the 1447 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 492 incidents — about 34% below the 751 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 2,548, up 66% from 1,534 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 2,781, up 51% from 1,845 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 1,120, up 41% from 797 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
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
814 incidents over the past 12 months — 1123 below Downtown's 1,937.
Open page →Koreatown
781 incidents over the past 12 months — 1156 below Downtown's 1,937.
Open page →Westlake
698 incidents over the past 12 months — 1239 below Downtown's 1,937.
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 | 1 | — 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.