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.
Five categories moved in Northridge this July briefing, and the shape is almost entirely structural. One category registered a single below-trend signal; four others are showing sustained, multi-month shifts rather than one-month noise. The dominant direction is downward across property and violent crime, with the notable exception of theft-from-vehicle and other larceny, which are running meaningfully above their prior-year pace.
Burglary is the clearest story: 143 incidents over the current 12 months against 299 in the year before, a 52.2% decrease, and it appears both as a one-month below-trend signal and as a sustained structural shift. Robbery reinforces the pattern, down 34.8% over the same window (60 vs. 92). On the other side, theft from vehicle is up 44.4% year-over-year (377 vs. 261) and other larceny is up 18.8% (690 vs. 581), categories that have absorbed some of the volume that burglary has shed. Everything else, aggravated assault, sexual assault, vandalism, and arson, moved within relatively modest ranges or continued their own gradual declines.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 143 incidents — about 47% 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 143, down 52% from 299 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 377, up 44% from 261 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 262, down 28% from 362 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 60, down 35% from 92 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 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
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.”
San Pedro
141 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Northridge's 143.
Open page →Valley Glen
145 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Northridge's 143.
Open page →Chatsworth
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Northridge's 143.
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.