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 March — one single-month below-trend signal and two sustained structural shifts. The structural pattern is broadly downward across property crime, with motor vehicle theft and burglary both showing multi-month declines, not just a quiet March.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal: 92 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline of 201.81, and down 37.4% against the prior-year window of 147. Burglary runs similarly below its prior-year pace — 53 current vs. 88 prior, a 39.8% reduction over 12 months. Other Larceny is the one category moving in the opposite direction, up 11.9% year-over-year (66 vs. 59), and everything else tracked this month was within range.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 92 incidents — about 54% below the 202 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 92, down 37% from 147 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 53, down 40% from 88 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 March 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.”
Mid-Wilshire
92 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below El Sereno's 92.
Open page →West Adams
92 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below El Sereno's 92.
Open page →Valley Village
91 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below El Sereno's 92.
Open page →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
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, 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.