Mar Vista Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Mar Vista is a Westside neighborhood between Venice and Culver City, organized around the Venice and Centinela Boulevard corridors. Predominantly mid-century single-family homes and small apartment buildings; the Mar Vista Farmers Market on Grand View Boulevard is a weekly anchor.
Eight categories moved in Mar Vista this March — five ran below trend in the current month, three registered as sustained structural shifts over the trailing 12 months. The overall shape is broadly downward across both property and violent crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signals: the trailing 12-month total sits at 73 incidents against a multi-year baseline of 130.35, and down 34.8% against the prior year's 112. Burglary is the sharpest 12-month mover, down 57.0% (34 incidents vs. 79 prior year), while robbery dropped 36.4% to just 7 incidents over the same window. Everything else in the tracked categories — theft from vehicle, other larceny, vandalism, aggravated assault, sexual assault — also shifted, with aggravated assault the one category running counter to the trend at 25.9% above the prior year.
Notable signals 5
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 73 incidents — about 44% below the 130 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 7 incidents — about 67% below the 21 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 34 incidents — about 74% below the 129 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 102 incidents — about 22% below the 131 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 102 incidents — about 58% below the 241 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 34, down 57% from 79 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 102, down 35% from 157 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 73, down 35% 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 March 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 Mar Vista 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.”
Hollywood Hills
72 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Mar Vista's 73.
Open page →Lake Balboa
74 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Mar Vista's 73.
Open page →Glassell Park
71 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Mar Vista's 73.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Mar Vista, 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
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, 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.