Playa Vista Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Playa Vista is a Westside neighborhood on the former Hughes Aircraft site, organized around Jefferson Boulevard and the Ballona Creek corridor. A planned community of mid-2000s vintage; anchored by the Spruce Goose hangar (now Google's Playa Vista campus), Whole Foods, and the Centerpointe office park.
Seven signals moved in Playa Vista this April — four one-month below-trend drops, two sustained multi-month structural shifts, and one zero-event category. The overall shape is broadly and consistently downward across property crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Burglary is the most pronounced move: 11 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline of 68.13, a 12-month total that is down 80.7% from 57 in the prior year. Theft from vehicle and vandalism both ran below trend as well — down 46.2% and 46.0% year-over-year respectively — while motor vehicle theft added a third one-month drop signal. The two sustained-shift signals indicate these aren't isolated quiet months; multiple categories have been running at lower structural levels for an extended stretch.
Notable signals 4
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 11 incidents — about 84% below the 68 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 36 incidents — about 43% below the 63 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 27 incidents — about 42% below the 46 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 42 incidents — about 62% below the 111 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 42, down 46% from 78 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 27, down 46% from 50 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 Playa Vista 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.”
Rancho Park
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Playa Vista's 11.
Open page →Leimert Park
12 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Playa Vista's 11.
Open page →Manchester Square
12 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Playa Vista's 11.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Playa Vistadoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Playa Vista'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 Vista, 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.