Pacific Palisades Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Pacific Palisades is a Westside coastal neighborhood between Santa Monica and Malibu, organized around Sunset Boulevard and the Palisades Village commercial center. Anchored by Will Rogers State Historic Park, the Getty Villa, and the bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway.
Five categories moved in Pacific Palisades this April — four single-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The dominant shape is a broad, multi-category decline across property crime, not a single outlier pulling the numbers down.
Theft from vehicle, other larceny, and burglary all ran below trend this month. The 12-month trajectory behind those signals is substantial: theft from vehicle sits at 35 incidents over the trailing year against a baseline mean of 186.09, and the year-over-year comparison shows a -48.5% drop. Burglary and other larceny follow the same direction — down 35.5% and 32.4% respectively against the prior 12 months — and the one sustained-shift signal indicates at least one of these moves reflects a structural change, not just a quiet April.
Notable signals 4
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 35 incidents — about 81% below the 186 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 50 incidents — about 45% below the 91 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 74% below the 77 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 10 incidents — about 76% below the 42 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 35, down 49% from 68 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Pacific Palisades 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.”
Arleta
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Pacific Palisades's 35.
Open page →Playa del Rey
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Pacific Palisades's 35.
Open page →San Pedro
37 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Pacific Palisades's 35.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Pacific Palisades, 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.