Harvard Park Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Harvard Park is a South LA residential neighborhood around Western Avenue and 71st Street, between Hyde Park and Vermont-Slauson. Predominantly single-family bungalows on a tight grid, anchored by Harvard Park itself and the Western Avenue commercial strip.
Seven categories ran below trend in Harvard Park this April — every tracked signal this month was a drop, with no spikes, sustained shifts, or rare events in the mix. The pattern is uniform: property crime across the board is running well under its multi-year baseline.
Motor Vehicle Theft leads the signal list, with the current 12-month total at 0 against a prior-year total of 52 — a -100.0% move. Other Larceny and Theft from Vehicle tell the same story: 0 incidents each over the trailing 12 months, against 23 and 36 respectively in the year before. Everything else tracked this month fell within a similarly quiet range.
Notable signals 6
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 0 incidents — about 100% below the 112 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 0 incidents — about 100% below the 57 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 0 incidents — about 100% below the 68 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 0 incidents — about 100% below the 69 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 0 incidents — about 100% below the 55 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 0 incidents — about 100% below the 50 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Vandalism
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
How Harvard Park 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.”
Chatsworth Reservoir
2 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Harvard Park's 0.
Open page →Carthay
4 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Harvard Park's 0.
Open page →Hansen Dam
4 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Harvard Park's 0.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Harvard Park has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (15 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 | 15 | 100% |
| Burglary | 11 | 9.1% |
| Theft from vehicle | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Harvard 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 Harvard 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.