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 March — five ran below trend in the current month, and three registered as sustained structural shifts across the trailing 12 months. The overall shape is a broad, multi-category decline across both property and violent crime, not a single outlier pulling the numbers down.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest signal: 94 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline of 395.71, and down 73.7% year-over-year from 357 to 94. Theft from vehicle follows a similar arc, off 62.5% (261 to 98), and vandalism is down 18.0% (172 to 141). Everything else in the tracked categories — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny — also ran below prior-year levels, with sexual assault down 54.8% and burglary down 34.8%. Arson is the lone exception, edging up from 5 to 6 incidents over the 12-month window, but at those volumes the move carries little weight.
Notable signals 5
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 94 incidents — about 76% below the 396 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 98 incidents — about 70% below the 326 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 141 incidents — about 35% below the 219 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 19 incidents — about 46% below the 35 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 30 incidents — about 72% below the 107 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 94, down 74% from 357 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 98, down 63% from 261 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 245, down 35% from 378 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 March 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
94 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Panorama City's 94.
Open page →Tarzana
94 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Panorama City's 94.
Open page →El Sereno
92 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Panorama City's 94.
Open page →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
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, 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.