Mission Hills Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Mission Hills is a northern San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around the San Fernando Mission and the 405/118 freeway interchange. Anchored by the historic Mission San Fernando Rey de España, Brand Park, and the Sepulveda VA medical campus to the south.
Six categories moved in Mission Hills this April — four as sustained structural shifts and two as single-month below-trend signals. The dominant pattern is a broad, multi-year pullback across property crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest single signal: the trailing 12 months stand at 31 incidents against a baseline of 94.3, down 62.2% against the prior year. Theft from vehicle appears twice in the top signals — once as a one-month drop and again as a sustained shift — with 48 incidents over the current 12 months against 101 in the year before, a 52.5% reduction. Other larceny and burglary show the same structural character, down 55.8% and 60.0% respectively over the same window. Robbery is the one counter-move: 25 incidents in the current 12 months against 19 prior, up 31.6%, though the absolute count remains low.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 31 incidents — about 67% below the 94 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 48 incidents — about 61% below the 123 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 84, down 56% from 190 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 31, down 62% from 82 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 48, down 53% from 101 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 49, down 44% from 88 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 Mission Hills 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.”
Larchmont
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Mission Hills's 31.
Open page →Montecito Heights
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Mission Hills's 31.
Open page →Porter Ranch
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Mission Hills's 31.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Mission Hills has spiked other larceny historically (10 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 11 | 72.7% |
| Other larceny | 10 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 5 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 4 | — too few |
| Sexual assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Mission Hills'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 Mission Hills, 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.