El Sereno Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
El Sereno is an Eastside neighborhood between Lincoln Heights and Alhambra, organized around Huntington Drive and Eastern Avenue. Predominantly hillside single-family homes; anchored by Cal State LA (just to the south) and Ascot Hills Park.
Three categories moved in El Sereno this April — one single-month below-trend signal and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime, with the sustained shifts in motor vehicle theft and burglary indicating multi-month declines rather than a one-time quiet period.
Motor vehicle theft is the most prominent signal: the current 12-month total is 90 incidents against a prior-year figure of 136, down 33.8% year-over-year. Burglary shows a similar structural pattern — 50 incidents in the trailing 12 months versus 87 in the year before, a 42.5% reduction. Other Larceny moved in the opposite direction, up 30.8% (68 vs. 52), the one category running above its prior-year pace while everything else in the tracked set held flat or declined.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 90 incidents — about 55% below the 201 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 50, down 43% from 87 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 90, down 34% from 136 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
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 El Sereno compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Valley Village
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below El Sereno's 90.
Open page →Chatsworth
91 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above El Sereno's 90.
Open page →Encino
89 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below El Sereno's 90.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When El Sereno has spiked theft from vehicle historically (6 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 83.3% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Burglary | 8 | 0% |
| Theft from vehicle | 6 | 83.3% |
| Sexual assault | 4 | — too few |
| Other larceny | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows El Sereno's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 El Sereno, 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.