Pico-Union Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Pico-Union is a Central LA neighborhood west of Downtown, organized around Pico Boulevard and Union Avenue. Anchored by the historic Variety Arts Theatre and a dense small-apartment housing stock.
Seven categories moved in Pico-Union this April — two one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts. The dominant pattern is a broad, multi-year pullback across both violent and property crime, not a single-month anomaly.
Burglary and motor vehicle theft both ran below trend in April, with burglary's 12-month total at 70 against a prior-year figure of 104 — down 32.7%. Robbery is the clearest structural story: 91 incidents over the current 12 months against 143 in the prior period, a 36.4% decrease that reflects a sustained shift, not a one-month dip. The remaining sustained-shift signals — including aggravated assault and theft from vehicle — reinforce the same directional move across nearly every tracked category in the neighborhood.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 70 incidents — about 41% below the 119 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 183 incidents — about 39% below the 302 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.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 172, down 34% from 259 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 208, down 30% from 298 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 242, down 27% from 330 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 91, down 36% from 143 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 Pico-Union compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Historic South-Central
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Pico-Union's 70.
Open page →Hollywood Hills West
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Pico-Union's 70.
Open page →Vermont-Slauson
72 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Pico-Union's 70.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Pico-Union has spiked aggravated assault historically (8 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Robbery | 15 | 93.3% |
| Theft from vehicle | 9 | 11.1% |
| Aggravated assault | 8 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 7 | 57.1% |
| Burglary | 5 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 5 | 100% |
| Arson | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Pico-Union'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 Pico-Union, 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.