Historic South-Central Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Historic South-Central is the original South Central LA corridor along Central Avenue between Vernon and Slauson, the heart of the city's mid-century jazz scene. Anchors include the Dunbar Hotel, the Lincoln Theater, the 28th Street YMCA, and the Central Avenue commercial strip.
Five categories moved in Historic South-Central this August, one single-month below-trend signal and four sustained structural shifts. The structural pattern is mixed: robbery is running meaningfully below where it has tracked historically, while theft from vehicle, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, and vandalism have all shifted upward across the trailing 12 months. The dominant story is property crime climbing across multiple categories, not a single noisy month.
Robbery is the strongest signal in either direction, at 125 incidents over the past 12 months against 166 in the year prior, a 24.7% reduction. That drop sits against a property crime backdrop moving the other way: theft from vehicle is up 50.7% year over year (202 vs. 134), and other larceny is up 39.4% (428 vs. 307). Vandalism and motor vehicle theft show similarly large 12-month gains. Every other tracked category, including aggravated assault and burglary, was within a few percent of its prior-year range.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 125 incidents — about 36% below the 195 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.
- Vandalism is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 299, up 54% from 194 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 428, up 39% from 307 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 274, up 47% from 187 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 202, up 51% from 134 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 Historic South-Central compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Broadway-Manchester
127 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Historic South-Central's 125.
Open page →Vermont Knolls
127 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Historic South-Central's 125.
Open page →South Park
128 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Historic South-Central's 125.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Historic South-Central, 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.