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.
Nine categories moved in Downtown Los Angeles this April — four one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts, all pointing the same direction. The shape of the month is a broad, multi-category decline across both violent and property crime, not a single anomaly pulling the average down.
Robbery is the most prominent single signal: 377 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a baseline of 806.36, and down 38.0% against the prior 12-month total of 608. Burglary and sexual assault also ran below trend this month — burglary is down 19.7% year-over-year (372 vs. 463) and sexual assault down 24.9% (187 vs. 249). The five sustained-shift signals mean these aren't just quiet weeks; the structural level of activity across multiple categories has reset lower over the past year.
Notable signals 4
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 377 incidents — about 53% below the 806 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 372 incidents — about 49% below the 729 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 187 incidents — about 19% below the 231 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 567 incidents — about 55% below the 1257 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 1,241, down 48% from 2,396 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 567, down 56% from 1,293 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 1,522, down 34% from 2,299 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 1,162, down 32% from 1,706 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
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
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 robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Westlake
417 incidents over the past 12 months — 40 above Downtown's 377.
Open page →Hollywood
227 incidents over the past 12 months — 150 below Downtown's 377.
Open page →Koreatown
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 163 below Downtown's 377.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Downtown has spiked vandalism 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 13 | 30.8% |
| Vandalism | 10 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 7 | 100% |
| Theft from vehicle | 5 | 100% |
| Aggravated assault | 2 | — too few |
| Burglary | 2 | — too few |
| Homicide | 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.