Mid-City Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Mid-City is a Central LA neighborhood between Pico and Venice Boulevards, organized around the La Brea, Fairfax, and Crenshaw commercial corridors. Predominantly Spanish Colonial Revival single-family homes and four-plexes; anchored by the Mid-City Heritage square and the Metro E Line's Expo/La Brea station.
Nine categories moved in Mid-City this April — five running below their single-month trend and four registering as sustained multi-year structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across both property and violent crime, with no spikes or rare-event signals in the mix.
Theft from vehicle leads the tracked signals: 178 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a baseline mean of 374.85, and down 39.2% against the prior year's 293. Motor vehicle theft is down 62.4% (96 vs. 255) and vandalism down 49.5% (141 vs. 279) — both among the four categories carrying sustained-shift signals, meaning the decline predates this single month. Robbery and aggravated assault are also lower on the 12-month comparison, off 27.9% and 17.2% respectively, and all other tracked categories stayed within their expected ranges.
Notable signals 5
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 178 incidents — about 53% below the 375 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 96 incidents — about 70% below the 319 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 141 incidents — about 46% below the 260 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 44 incidents — about 48% below the 85 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 61 incidents — about 60% below the 151 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 96, down 62% from 255 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 141, down 50% from 279 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 178, down 39% from 293 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 164, down 34% from 249 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 Mid-City compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Reseda
178 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Mid-City's 178.
Open page →Historic South-Central
181 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Mid-City's 178.
Open page →Silver Lake
174 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Mid-City's 178.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Mid-City has spiked other larceny historically (17 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 94.1% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 17 | 94.1% |
| Aggravated assault | 4 | — too few |
| Motor vehicle theft | 3 | — too few |
| Theft from vehicle | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Mid-City'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 Mid-City, 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.