North Hills Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
North Hills is a north San Fernando Valley neighborhood between Granada Hills and Van Nuys, organized around Devonshire Street and Sepulveda Boulevard. Predominantly mid-century single-family homes; anchored by the Cal State Northridge campus to the west.
Five signals across North Hills in April 2026 — two one-month below-trend moves and three sustained structural shifts. The dominant shape is a broad, multi-year retreat in vehicle-related property crime, not a single-month anomaly.
Theft from vehicle is the strongest signal: 148 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline mean of 336.06, and down 44.8% from the prior 12-month total of 268. Motor vehicle theft tells a similar story, off 57.3% year-over-year (105 vs. 246). Both categories appear in the top signals — theft from vehicle registers as both a one-month drop and a sustained structural shift, reinforcing that this is a longer-trend move, not noise. Everything else — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism — also ran below their prior-year totals, though those categories did not cross the signal threshold this month.
Notable signals 2
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 148 incidents — about 56% below the 336 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 105 incidents — about 69% below the 335 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 105, down 57% from 246 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 148, down 45% from 268 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 143, down 27% from 195 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 North Hills compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw
150 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above North Hills's 148.
Open page →Vermont-Slauson
155 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above North Hills's 148.
Open page →West Adams
158 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 above North Hills's 148.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When North Hills has spiked other larceny historically (22 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 50% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 22 | 50% |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows North Hills's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 North 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.