Sawtelle Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Sawtelle is a Westside neighborhood organized around Sawtelle Boulevard south of Wilshire. A dense restaurant-and-retail strip in a predominantly small-apartment-and-single-family neighborhood; bordered by the VA medical campus to the north.
Three signals moved in Sawtelle this April — one single-month below-trend reading and two structural shifts that have been building across the trailing 12 months. The structural layer is the more consequential story: both other larceny and burglary have moved far enough from prior-year levels to register as multi-month patterns, not just monthly noise.
Other larceny is down 42.6% year-over-year, 433 incidents in the current 12 months against 754 in the prior period — the largest absolute volume change in the neighborhood. Burglary moved in the opposite direction, up 77.1% on a 12-month basis (85 vs 48), and is the sharpest percentage increase across all tracked categories. Theft from vehicle is also running below its multi-year baseline — 224 incidents against a baseline mean of 368 — and added a single-month below-trend signal this period. Everything else, including robbery, aggravated assault, and vandalism, stayed within normal range.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 224 incidents — about 39% below the 368 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 433, down 43% from 754 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 85, up 77% from 48 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 Sawtelle 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.”
Winnetka
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below Sawtelle's 224.
Open page →East Hollywood
239 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 above Sawtelle's 224.
Open page →Echo Park
209 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 below Sawtelle's 224.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Sawtelle has spiked other larceny historically (18 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 66.7% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 18 | 66.7% |
Each row shows Sawtelle's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 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 Sawtelle, 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.