Palms Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Palms is a Westside neighborhood between Culver City and Mar Vista, organized around National Boulevard and Motor Avenue. Predominantly mid-century apartment buildings and dingbat-style four-plexes; anchored by the Metro E Line's Palms station.
Ten categories moved in Palms this April — five one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts, all running in the same direction. The month's shape is broadly and consistently downward across property crime, with no spikes or rare-event signals anywhere in the data.
Other larceny, vandalism, and theft from vehicle each ran below trend, and the 12-month totals confirm the depth of the shift: other larceny sits at 150 incidents against a prior-year count of 244 (down 38.5%), theft from vehicle at 130 against 255 (down 49.0%), and burglary at 20 against 85 (down 76.5%). Every other tracked category outside of robbery was within the same downward pattern; robbery is the one exception, edging 6.5% above its prior-year total at 33 incidents.
Notable signals 5
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 150 incidents — about 41% below the 255 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 73 incidents — about 54% below the 158 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 130 incidents — about 64% below the 362 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 86% below the 139 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 88 incidents — about 65% below the 249 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 130, down 49% from 255 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 20, down 77% from 85 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 73, down 49% from 143 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 150, down 39% from 244 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 Palms compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Broadway-Manchester
147 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Palms's 150.
Open page →Winnetka
153 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Palms's 150.
Open page →Silver Lake
154 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Palms's 150.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Palms has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (5 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 60% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 5 | 60% |
| Burglary | 3 | — too few |
| Aggravated assault | 3 | — too few |
| Robbery | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Palms's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 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 Palms, 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.