Highland Park Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Highland Park is a Northeast LA neighborhood organized around Figueroa Street and York Boulevard. Anchored by the Southwest Museum of the American Indian (now part of the Autry), Sycamore Grove Park, and the Metro L Line's Highland Park station.
Six categories moved in Highland Park this August, and the mix tilts heavily toward structural increases rather than one-off noise. Four of the six signals are sustained shifts, meaning the movement is multi-month and embedded in the trailing 12-month window, not a single anomalous reading. One fresh spike and one below-trend drop round out the picture. The overall shape is a neighborhood where several property and violent crime categories have been running above their prior-year levels long enough to constitute a trend.
Aggravated assault is the sharpest signal: 128 incidents in the current 12-month window against 89 in the prior year, up 43.8%, and it registers as both a single-month spike and a sustained shift, meaning the elevation predates August. Theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft show the steepest 12-month rises in the property categories, up 70.9% (217 vs. 127) and 54.8% (144 vs. 93) respectively, both consistent with the sustained-shift pattern. Burglary is the one category running in the opposite direction, down 25.5% against the prior year, the lone clear below-trend signal in an otherwise upward-leaning month.
Notable signals 2
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 128 incidents — about 30% above the 98 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 38 incidents — about 41% below the 64 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 217, up 71% from 127 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 144, up 55% from 93 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 196, up 35% from 145 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Aggravated Assault is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 128, up 44% from 89 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 Highland Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Harbor Gateway
128 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Highland Park's 128.
Open page →Northridge
128 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Highland Park's 128.
Open page →Canoga Park
129 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Highland Park's 128.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Highland 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Highland 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 Highland 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.