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.
Seven categories moved in Highland Park this April — four ran below trend in a single-month signal, three registered as sustained structural shifts. The dominant shape is a broad, multi-category decline across property crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Theft from vehicle leads the signals: the current 12-month total is 76 incidents against a baseline mean of 207.58 — down 53.9% against the prior year's 165. Motor vehicle theft and vandalism both ran below trend as well, with motor vehicle theft down 37.8% year-over-year (120 vs. 193) and vandalism down 30.7% (124 vs. 179). The three sustained-shift signals point to changes that predate April; this month confirms the pattern rather than introducing a new one.
Notable signals 4
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 76 incidents — about 63% below the 208 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 120 incidents — about 50% below the 240 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 124 incidents — about 29% below the 173 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 43 incidents — about 35% below the 66 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 has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 76, down 54% from 165 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 120, down 38% from 193 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 124, down 31% from 179 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 Highland Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Arlington Heights
76 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Highland Park's 76.
Open page →Fairfax
76 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Highland Park's 76.
Open page →Lake Balboa
76 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Highland Park's 76.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Highland Park has spiked robbery historically (6 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 16 | 93.8% |
| Robbery | 6 | 100% |
| Theft from vehicle | 5 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 4 | — 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.