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 by signal count: one category crossed the anomaly threshold, and it was a structural one. Motor vehicle theft has shifted upward over multiple months, not a one-month outlier but a sustained move that now sits 87.5% above the prior 12-month period. The remaining seven tracked categories stayed within range.
The 12-month motor vehicle theft total stands at 60 incidents against 32 in the year before, the sharpest year-over-year gap in the neighborhood's current crime mix. Other larceny and theft from vehicle are also running above their prior-year levels, up 53.1% and 36.2% respectively, though neither crossed the threshold for a formal signal this month. On the other side, robbery is down 33.3% over the trailing 12 months and aggravated assault is down 16.7%, both moving in the opposite direction from the property categories.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 60, up 88% from 32 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through July 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 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.”
West Hills
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Montecito Heights's 60.
Open page →Manchester Square
55 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Montecito Heights's 60.
Open page →Beverly Grove
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Montecito Heights's 60.
Open page →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.