Manchester Square Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Manchester Square is a narrow South LA strip just north of LAX, between the 405 Freeway and Aviation Boulevard. Most of the residential fabric was acquired and cleared by LAX over decades for noise mitigation; the neighborhood is now mostly cleared lots and remaining low-rise commercial along Manchester and Century.
Three tracked signals emerged in Manchester Square this April — two one-month below-trend readings and one sustained structural shift. The structural story centers on motor vehicle theft, which appears in both the single-month drop and the multi-month sustained-shift signal, suggesting the category has moved to a fundamentally lower level, not just a quiet week.
Burglary is down 45.5% over the trailing 12 months (12 incidents vs. 22 the prior year), the sharpest year-over-year move in the neighborhood this period. Motor vehicle theft has fallen 47.3% over the same window — 48 incidents against 91 the prior year — which is what the sustained-shift signal is measuring. Robbery moved the other direction, up 37.5% on a small base (22 vs. 16), but did not generate a signal this month; the remaining categories were within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 12 incidents — about 67% below the 37 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 48 incidents — about 65% below the 137 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 48, down 47% from 91 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Manchester Square compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Leimert Park
12 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Manchester Square's 12.
Open page →Lake View Terrace
13 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Manchester Square's 12.
Open page →Playa Vista
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Manchester Square's 12.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Manchester Square has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 9 | 100% |
| Robbery | 9 | 0% |
| Other larceny | 8 | 100% |
Each row shows Manchester Square's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 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 Manchester Square, 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.