Echo Park Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Echo Park is an Eastside neighborhood organized around Echo Park Lake and the Sunset Boulevard commercial corridor. Bordered by Elysian Park (and Dodger Stadium) to the north and Downtown to the southeast; predominantly Craftsman bungalows on a hilly grid.
Six categories moved in Echo Park this August, three fresh spikes, two sustained structural shifts, and one below-trend signal. The spikes dominate the mix: vandalism, other larceny, and motor vehicle theft (via sustained shift) are all running well above their prior-year pace, while robbery is the one category pulling in the opposite direction.
Vandalism is the strongest single-month signal, with 214 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 169 in the year before, a 26.6% rise. Other larceny has moved even further on a 12-month basis, up 55.9% (329 vs. 211), suggesting something structural rather than a single noisy month. Robbery is the clearest counterweight, down 30.4% year-over-year, 39 incidents against 56, the one category in Echo Park where the trend is clearly and materially lower.
Notable signals 4
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 214 incidents — about 38% above the 155 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 329 incidents — about 67% above the 196 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 29 incidents — about 60% above the 18 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 39 incidents — about 34% below the 59 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 329, up 56% from 211 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 203, up 41% from 144 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 Echo Park 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.”
Tarzana
219 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Echo Park's 214.
Open page →Winnetka
209 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Echo Park's 214.
Open page →Encino
220 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Echo Park's 214.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Echo Parkdoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 2 | — too few |
| Vandalism | 2 | — too few |
| Sexual assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Echo Park'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 Echo Park, 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.