Montecito Heights Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Montecito Heights is a hillside Northeast LA neighborhood east of Lincoln Heights and west of Highland Park, organized around the ridge between the 110 Freeway and the Arroyo Seco. Anchored by Ernest E. Debs Regional Park, the Heritage Square Museum, and the Audubon Center at Debs Park.
Montecito Heights had a narrow month in August 2026: one category registered a notable signal, vandalism, and every other tracked category stayed within its normal range. The structural story underneath that quiet surface is more mixed, with violent crime running well below prior-year levels while several property categories have risen over the trailing 12 months.
Vandalism is up 6.0% over the prior 12 months, reaching 71 incidents against 67 the year before, and the single-month signal this briefing points to a recent acceleration within that trend. The contrast with violent crime is sharp: aggravated assault is down 27.3% (32 incidents vs. 44) and burglary has fallen 34.6% (17 vs. 26). Motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle are moving the other direction, up 63.9% and 31.6% respectively over the same 12-month window, which means the property crime picture is split rather than uniformly calm.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 71 incidents — about 50% above the 47 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 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 Montecito Heights compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Tujunga
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Montecito Heights's 71.
Open page →Windsor Square
74 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Montecito Heights's 71.
Open page →Pico-Robertson
66 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Montecito Heights's 71.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Montecito Heightsdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Montecito Heights's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 Montecito Heights, 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.