DROP · MOTOR VEHICLE THEFTAPRIL 2026 BRIEFINGLOS ANGELES · 41.1K residents

Mid-Wilshire Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles

Mid-Wilshire is a Central LA neighborhood organized around the Wilshire Boulevard corridor between Western and La Brea. Anchored by the Wilshire Country Club, the Larchmont commercial strip, and the Metro D Line's Wilshire/Western station.

MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT · 24-MO COUNT04 2026 · 8
0142812-mo avg: 7.8
MID-WILSHIRECITYWIDE TREND (RESCALED)-33% 12MO YOY
+300%MoM
-44%12mo YoY
94last 12mo
8this month
01 · TL;DR

Six signals surfaced in Mid-Wilshire this April — two one-month below-trend drops and four sustained structural shifts. The dominant pattern is a broad, multi-year pullback across property crime: the sustained shifts indicate this isn't a single quiet month but a structural change that has been building across the prior 24 months.

Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest single signal: the current 12-month total of 94 sits well below the baseline of 244.4, and the 12-month count is down 44.4% against the prior year's 169. Theft from vehicle appears twice in the top signals — both as a one-month drop and as a sustained structural shift — with the 12-month total at 190 against 370 the year before, a 48.6% decline. Vandalism and other larceny show similar structural moves, down 49.8% and 41.6% respectively over the same window. Robbery is the one category running counter to this pattern, up 12.3% year-over-year (73 incidents vs. 65).

2 drops4 sustained shifts
02 · Notable signals

Notable signals 2

DROP · MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT

Motor Vehicle Theft

The past 12 months saw 94 incidents — about 62% below the 244 average from prior years.

DROP · THEFT FROM VEHICLE

Theft from Vehicle

The past 12 months saw 190 incidents — about 57% below the 440 average from prior years.

03 · By category

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.

Homicidebelow threshold
2024-052026-04
Robbery+12%
2024-052026-04
Aggravated Assault-23%
2024-052026-04
Sexual Assault-40%
2024-052026-04
Burglary-6%
2024-052026-04
Theft from Vehicle-49%
2024-052026-04
Other Larceny-42%
2024-052026-04
Motor Vehicle Theft-44%
2024-052026-04
Vandalism-50%
2024-052026-04
Arsonbelow threshold
2024-052026-04
05 · Forecast

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

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Arson

NO FORECAST

Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.

Burglary

MAY 2026
Most likely 10 next month — likely between 0 and 21.
+16% vs 12-month average (≈8.8)

Homicide

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Motor Vehicle Theft

MAY 2026
Most likely 4 next month — likely between 0 and 15.
45% vs 12-month average (≈7.8)

Other Larceny

MAY 2026
Most likely 33 next month — likely between 5 and 65.
+5% vs 12-month average (≈31.3)

Robbery

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Sexual Assault

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Theft from Vehicle

MAY 2026
Most likely 17 next month — likely between 0 and 36.
+8% vs 12-month average (≈15.8)

Vandalism

MAY 2026
Most likely 17 next month — likely between 7 and 28.
+44% vs 12-month average (≈11.9)
06 · Context & comps

How Mid-Wilshire 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.”

SPATIAL SPILLOVER · NEW

Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?

When Mid-Wilshire has spiked theft from vehicle historically (19 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.

Mid-Wilshire historical spike-event spillover by crime category (3-month lookahead, adjacent neighborhoods via shared boundary).
CategorySpike eventsSame-category spillover
Theft from vehicle19100%
Other larceny16100%
Aggravated assault1030%
Vandalism8100%
Motor vehicle theft6100%

Each row shows Mid-Wilshire'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.

07 · Patterns

Recurring local terms (last 12 months)

Top terms in incident descriptions for Mid-Wilshire, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.

pettygrandsimpleshopliftingmoreresidentialtfmvbfmvinjuryfirearmidentityweaponaggravatedfalsedeadlyaccessoriespartslesspretensesthreatsintimatepartnerwarrantforceappear
When does it happen?

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.

HOUR OF DAY · ALL CATEGORIES
040781412am6am12pm6pm11pm

Hour 0 is mildly inflated by reports without a known time defaulting to midnight — see methodology.

DAY OF WEEK · ALL CATEGORIES
09441,889MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
MONTH OF YEAR · ALL CATEGORIES
05831,166JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
08 · Methodology

How we built this page

DATA NOTE · LA FEED CHANGE

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.

Read the full LA caveat in methodology →

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.