Lake Balboa Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Lake Balboa is a central San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around the 80-acre Lake Balboa and the surrounding Anthony C. Beilenson Park, west of Van Nuys. Predominantly single-family ranch homes on a tight grid, with the Sepulveda Dam recreation area on its eastern edge.
Five signals across Lake Balboa in April 2026 — two one-month below-trend moves and three sustained multi-month structural shifts. The structural story is the stronger one: three categories are running below their prior-year baselines in a way that reflects a longer-term pattern, not just a quiet April.
Motor Vehicle Theft is the sharpest single signal: 66 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline mean of 112.62, down 35.9% year over year. Theft from Vehicle appears twice in the top signals — once as a one-month drop and once as a sustained shift — with the 12-month total at 76 against 125 the prior year, a 39.2% reduction. Aggravated Assault rounds out the structural picture, down 28.8% over the same window (42 vs. 59). The remaining tracked categories — Burglary, Other Larceny, Vandalism, and Robbery — were within range, with Robbery flat at 14 incidents year over year.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 66 incidents — about 41% below the 113 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 76 incidents — about 56% below the 173 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 39% from 125 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 63, down 38% from 101 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 66, down 36% from 103 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 Lake Balboa compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Eagle Rock
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Lake Balboa's 66.
Open page →Mar Vista
72 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Lake Balboa's 66.
Open page →Hollywood Hills
73 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Lake Balboa's 66.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Lake Balboa has spiked vandalism historically (15 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 15 | 100% |
| Aggravated assault | 11 | 72.7% |
| Burglary | 9 | 55.6% |
| Robbery | 6 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 6 | 100% |
| Theft from vehicle | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Lake Balboa'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 Lake Balboa, 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.