Northridge Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Northridge is a north San Fernando Valley neighborhood centered on California State University, Northridge. Predominantly single-family ranch homes; the 1994 Northridge earthquake's epicenter was just to the south of the campus.
Four categories moved in Northridge this August, and the shape is mixed: one category ran below trend for the month, while three others represent sustained structural shifts that have been building across the trailing 12 months. The dominant story is burglary, which appears twice in the top signals, as both a single-month below-trend reading and a longer-term structural decline. Theft from vehicle pulls in the opposite direction, with a sustained upward shift that cuts against the otherwise downward property-crime pattern.
Burglary is the clearest move: 134 incidents over the current 12 months against 293 in the prior year, a 54.3% reduction. That gap is structural, not a one-month dip. Theft from vehicle, by contrast, is up 25.2% year over year, 368 incidents against 294, and the sustained-shift signal confirms this is not noise. Vandalism is also down sharply, off 29.7% to 253 from 360, and robbery has fallen 30.0% to 63 from 90, though neither reached anomaly status this month.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 134 incidents — about 51% below the 271 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 134, down 54% from 293 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 253, down 30% from 360 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 368, up 25% from 294 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 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
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 Northridge compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Boyle Heights
137 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Northridge's 134.
Open page →Chatsworth
130 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Northridge's 134.
Open page →Valley Glen
138 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Northridge's 134.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Northridge, 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.