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.
Two categories moved in Lake Balboa this August, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a structural multi-year shift. The shape of the month is narrow but pointed in opposite directions: robbery ran well below its recent pace, while theft from vehicle has been grinding higher across the trailing 12 months, not a one-month anomaly but a sustained change in the category's baseline.
Robbery sits at 10 incidents over the current 12 months, against 19 in the year before, a 47.4% drop year-over-year. Theft from vehicle tells the opposite story: 153 incidents in the current 12-month window against 79 in the prior year, up 93.7%, and the sustained-shift signal confirms this is not noise. Everything else, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, ran within range of prior-year levels and generated no signals this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 10 incidents — about 54% below the 22 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 153, up 94% from 79 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 Lake Balboa 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.”
Cypress Park
10 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lake Balboa's 10.
Open page →Hancock Park
10 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lake Balboa's 10.
Open page →Atwater Village
9 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Lake Balboa's 10.
Open page →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.