Playa del Rey Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Playa del Rey is a Westside coastal neighborhood at the southern end of Dockweiler State Beach, between Marina del Rey and LAX. Anchored by the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, the Del Rey Lagoon, and a small commercial strip along Culver Boulevard.
Five categories moved in Playa del Rey this March — four ran below trend in the current window, and one registered as a sustained multi-month structural shift. The dominant shape is a broad property-crime decline, with vehicle-related categories and burglary all tracking well under their prior-year levels.
Theft from vehicle, motor vehicle theft, and burglary are all running below trend. Theft from vehicle is the deepest mover on a volume basis: 34 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 70 the prior year, a 12-month total of 34 vs. a baseline near 99.92. Burglary is down 71.9% year-over-year (9 incidents vs. 32), and motor vehicle theft is down 58.1% (18 vs. 43). Every other tracked category — robbery, aggravated assault, sexual assault, other larceny, vandalism — also ended the 12-month window below its prior-year count.
Notable signals 4
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 34 incidents — about 66% below the 100 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 18 incidents — about 71% below the 61 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 9 incidents — about 78% below the 42 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 24 incidents — about 64% below the 66 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 34, down 51% from 70 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Playa del Rey compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Rancho Park
32 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Playa del Rey's 34.
Open page →Arleta
37 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Playa del Rey's 34.
Open page →Pacific Palisades
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Playa del Rey's 34.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Playa del Rey, 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.