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.
Three signals surfaced in Montecito Heights this March — two one-month below-trend drops and one sustained multi-month shift. The structural picture is broadly downward across vehicle-related property crime, with theft from vehicle appearing in both a single-month drop and a sustained shift, the clearest sign of a longer trend in the neighborhood's data.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest mover: the current 12-month total of 32 sits well below the prior 12-month total of 54, a -40.7% year-over-year change. Theft from vehicle has moved even further — 48 incidents against 90 in the prior year, down -46.7% — with the sustained-shift signal indicating that decline has built across multiple months, not just March. Vandalism, at 55 incidents against 53 in the prior year (+3.8%), was the one category that ran marginally above its prior-year level; every other tracked category ended the 12-month window below where it stood a year ago.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 32 incidents — about 62% below the 84 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 48 incidents — about 49% below the 95 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 48, down 47% from 90 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 March 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.”
Beverly Grove
33 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Montecito Heights's 32.
Open page →Larchmont
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Montecito Heights's 32.
Open page →Windsor Square
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Montecito Heights's 32.
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
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, 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.