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.
Eight categories moved in Historic South-Central this April — five ran below trend for the month, and three registered as sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across violent and property crime, with no spikes and no rare-event signals in the mix.
Robbery leads the notable signals: 106 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline of 200.7, and down 46.5% against the prior year's 198. Aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft both ran below trend as well — aggravated assault is down 19.5% year-over-year (239 vs. 297), and motor vehicle theft is down 17.7% (274 vs. 333). The three sustained-shift signals point to structural change, not just a quiet month.
Notable signals 5
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 106 incidents — about 47% below the 201 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 239 incidents — about 25% below the 320 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 274 incidents — about 53% below the 579 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 68 incidents — about 57% below the 158 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 181 incidents — about 50% below the 362 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 has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 266, down 37% from 421 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 106, down 47% from 198 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 68, down 39% from 112 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 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.”
Vermont Square
111 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Historic South-Central's 106.
Open page →South Park
100 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Historic South-Central's 106.
Open page →Broadway-Manchester
113 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Historic South-Central's 106.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Historic South-Central has spiked other larceny historically (13 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 | 13 | 100% |
| Theft from vehicle | 3 | — too few |
| Sexual assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Historic South-Central's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 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.