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.
Five categories moved in Playa Vista this March — four below-trend drops and one sustained structural shift, with no spikes or rare events. The shape of the month is broadly downward across property crime, with the declines running deep enough in several categories to register as the leading signals this briefing.
Burglary is the sharpest move: 15 incidents over the current 12 months against 56 in the prior year, down 73.2% and well below its multi-year baseline. Motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle also ran below trend — down 35.6% and 45.6% respectively against prior-year 12-month totals. The one sustained-shift signal indicates at least one of these declines has been in place long enough to reflect a structural change, not just a quiet month.
Notable signals 4
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 15 incidents — about 78% below the 68 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 38 incidents — about 40% below the 63 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 43 incidents — about 62% below the 112 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 29 incidents — about 37% below the 46 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 43, down 46% from 79 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 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.”
Beverly Crest
15 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Playa Vista's 15.
Open page →Carthay
16 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Playa Vista's 15.
Open page →Elysian Valley
16 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Playa Vista's 15.
Open page →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
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.