Pacoima Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Pacoima is a northeastern San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around Van Nuys Boulevard and the Hansen Dam recreation area. Anchored by Whiteman Airport, Hansen Dam Park, and the Metrolink Sun Valley/Pacoima area corridor.
Five categories moved in Pacoima in April 2026 — two one-month below-trend signals and three sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across both violent and property crime, with no spikes and no rare-event signals this period.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest single signal: 242 incidents in the current 12-month window against a baseline average of 360.13, a drop of 32.6% year-over-year. Burglary also ran below trend this month, down 31.5% against the prior 12 months (74 vs. 108). Sexual assault's sustained shift — down 49.0% over 12 months, 25 incidents against 49 in the prior year — reflects a multi-year structural move, not just a quiet April.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 242 incidents — about 33% below the 360 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 74 incidents — about 37% below the 118 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 242, down 33% from 359 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 204, down 30% from 292 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Sexual Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 25, down 49% from 49 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 Pacoima 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.”
East Hollywood
237 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Pacoima's 242.
Open page →Northridge
235 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Pacoima's 242.
Open page →Vermont Knolls
232 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below Pacoima's 242.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Pacoima has spiked vandalism historically (11 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 11 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 10 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 5 | 100% |
| Sexual assault | 4 | — too few |
| Robbery | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Pacoima's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 Pacoima, 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.