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.
Six categories moved in Historic South-Central this July 2026 briefing, split between two one-month below-trend signals and four sustained structural shifts. The below-trend moves are in violent crime: robbery and aggravated assault both ran short of their recent baselines this month. The sustained shifts run in the opposite direction, a multi-month structural rise across several property crime categories that has reshaped the neighborhood's overall volume.
Robbery's 12-month total stands at 135, down from 166 the prior year, an 18.7% drop that makes it the strongest single-month signal this period. Aggravated assault follows the same direction, 261 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 286 the year before, off 8.7%. Against those declines, theft from vehicle has built a sustained structural increase, 197 incidents in the current 12 months versus 127 prior, up 55.1%, and motor vehicle theft and vandalism show comparable multi-year moves in the same direction. The month's picture is not uniformly quiet: violent crime is easing while property crime has been climbing for long enough that the gap now shows up in the annual totals.
Notable signals 2
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 135 incidents — about 31% below the 196 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 261 incidents — about 18% below the 317 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.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 425, up 55% from 275 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 277, up 66% from 167 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Vandalism is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 295, up 60% from 185 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 197, up 55% from 127 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 July 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.”
Exposition Park
136 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Historic South-Central's 135.
Open page →South Park
130 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Historic South-Central's 135.
Open page →Watts
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Historic South-Central's 135.
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.