Sherman Oaks Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Sherman Oaks is a San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around Ventura Boulevard and the 405/101 freeway interchange. Anchored by the Sherman Oaks Galleria and a long stretch of mid-century single-family homes south of Ventura on the Santa Monica Mountains foothills.
Three signals moved in Sherman Oaks this August, all pointing the same direction: down. One was a single-month below-trend reading in burglary, and two were sustained structural shifts, burglary and vandalism both running lower across the trailing 12 months than the 12 before. The picture is not a noisy month with one outlier; it is a neighborhood where property crime has been repriced downward over two or more years.
Burglary is the most pronounced move: 206 incidents over the current 12 months against 416 in the prior year, a 50.5% reduction. Vandalism dropped 26.7% on the same comparison, 322 incidents against 439. Everything else in August was within range. Robbery and aggravated assault are also lower year-over-year, down 22.4% and 13.9% respectively, adding depth to a broader pattern of sustained volume reduction across Sherman Oaks.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 206 incidents — about 50% below the 413 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 206, down 51% from 416 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 322, down 27% from 439 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 August 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 Sherman Oaks 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.”
North Hollywood
211 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Sherman Oaks's 206.
Open page →Westlake
212 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Sherman Oaks's 206.
Open page →Studio City
190 incidents over the past 12 months — 16 below Sherman Oaks's 206.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sherman Oaks, 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.