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.
Seven categories moved in Sherman Oaks this April — three ran below trend on a single-month basis, four registered as sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is a broad property-crime pullback: drops and multi-year declines dominate across nearly every tracked category, with no spikes anywhere in the mix.
Theft from vehicle leads the property-crime story. The trailing 12-month total sits at 208 incidents against a multi-year baseline of 712.26, and the year-over-year decline is 61.2%. Burglary and motor vehicle theft both ran below trend as well — burglary is down 42.1% over the prior 12 months (259 vs. 447), motor vehicle theft down 39.5% (167 vs. 276). Everything else tracked this month fell within those same downward sustained-shift patterns, with no category moving against the grain.
Notable signals 3
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 208 incidents — about 71% below the 712 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 167 incidents — about 46% below the 309 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 259 incidents — about 40% below the 429 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 208, down 61% from 536 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 259, down 42% from 447 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 293, down 37% from 466 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 167, down 40% from 276 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 Sherman Oaks 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.”
Pico-Union
208 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Sherman Oaks's 208.
Open page →Echo Park
209 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sherman Oaks's 208.
Open page →Pacoima
204 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Sherman Oaks's 208.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Sherman Oaks has spiked other larceny historically (20 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 20 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 13 | 100% |
| Sexual assault | 6 | 66.7% |
| Aggravated assault | 6 | 100% |
| Burglary | 5 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 4 | — too few |
Each row shows Sherman Oaks's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 8 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 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.