Panorama City Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Panorama City is a central San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around Van Nuys Boulevard and Roscoe Boulevard, between Van Nuys and Pacoima. Anchored by the Panorama Mall, the former General Motors Van Nuys plant site, and the Roscoe Boulevard commercial strip.
Eight categories moved in Panorama City this April — five ran below trend in the current month and three registered as sustained multi-year structural shifts. The overall shape is a broad, deep decline across both property and violent crime, with no spikes or rare events anywhere in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signal list: 85 incidents over the current 12 months against a prior-year total of 344, down 75.3% year-over-year. Theft from vehicle is down 65.1% on the same basis (87 vs. 249), and sexual assault dropped 57.1% (18 vs. 42). The three sustained-shift signals confirm this isn't a single quiet month — the declines across robbery, aggravated assault, and vandalism have been building across the trailing 24-month window.
Notable signals 5
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 85 incidents — about 78% below the 395 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 87 incidents — about 73% below the 324 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 18 incidents — about 49% below the 36 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 139 incidents — about 36% below the 218 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 29 incidents — about 73% below the 105 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 85, down 75% from 344 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 87, down 65% from 249 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 239, down 33% from 358 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 Panorama City 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.”
Sylmar
86 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Panorama City's 85.
Open page →Tarzana
86 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Panorama City's 85.
Open page →Los Feliz
82 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Panorama City's 85.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Panorama City has spiked other larceny 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 11 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 9 | 0% |
| Aggravated assault | 6 | 50% |
| Sexual assault | 2 | — too few |
| Theft from vehicle | 1 | — too few |
| Motor vehicle theft | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Panorama City'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 Panorama City, 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.