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.
Four categories ran below trend in Playa del Rey this April — all drops, no spikes, no rare events. The shape of the month is uniformly downward across both property crime and vehicles: theft from vehicle, motor vehicle theft, burglary, and a fourth category all registered below-trend signals. That unanimity in direction is the story, not any single category.
Theft from vehicle is the strongest of the four, with the current 12-month total at 36 against a baseline of 99.04 — and down 32.1% against the prior 12-month period of 53. Burglary is down 79.3% year-over-year, 6 incidents against 29. Motor vehicle theft stands at 21 for the current 12 months, down 40.0% from 35. Everything else tracked this month was within range.
Notable signals 4
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 36 incidents — about 64% below the 99 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 21 incidents — about 65% below the 61 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 6 incidents — about 86% below the 42 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 21 incidents — about 68% 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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
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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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.”
Arleta
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Playa del Rey's 36.
Open page →Pacific Palisades
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Playa del Rey's 36.
Open page →San Pedro
37 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Playa del Rey's 36.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Playa del Rey has spiked vandalism historically (7 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 7 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 4 | — too few |
Each row shows Playa del Rey's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 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
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.