DROP · MOTOR VEHICLE THEFTAPRIL 2026 BRIEFINGLOS ANGELES · 37.7K residents

South Park Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles

South Park is a Central LA neighborhood at the southern end of Downtown, organized around the Crypto.com Arena, LA Live, and the Los Angeles Convention Center. Mid-rise residential conversions and recent high-rises along Figueroa Street and Olympic Boulevard.

MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT · 24-MO COUNT04 2026 · 8
0173312-mo avg: 13.8
SOUTH PARKCITYWIDE TREND (RESCALED)-33% 12MO YOY
-11%MoM
-18%12mo YoY
166last 12mo
8this month
01 · TL;DR

Two categories moved in South Park this April — one a single-month below-trend signal, one a multi-month structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward: motor vehicle theft ran below trend for the month, while other larceny's decline reflects a longer structural pattern, not just a quiet April.

Motor vehicle theft is the sharper of the two signals: the current 12-month total of 166 sits well below the baseline mean of 316.02, and down 18.2% against the prior 12 months (166 vs. 203). Other larceny is down 29.5% over the same window — 122 incidents in the current year against 173 in the prior — a sustained shift that has reshaped the category's baseline. Every other tracked category in South Park ran within normal range this month.

1 drop1 sustained shift
02 · Notable signals

Notable signals 1

DROP · MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT

Motor Vehicle Theft

The past 12 months saw 166 incidents — about 47% below the 316 average from prior years.

03 · By category

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.

Homicidebelow threshold
2024-052026-04
Robbery-20%
2024-052026-04
Aggravated Assault-14%
2024-052026-04
Sexual Assault-48%
2024-052026-04
Burglary-26%
2024-052026-04
Theft from Vehicle-8%
2024-052026-04
Other Larceny-30%
2024-052026-04
Motor Vehicle Theft-18%
2024-052026-04
Vandalism-2%
2024-052026-04
Arsonbelow threshold
2024-052026-04
05 · Forecast

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

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Arson

NO FORECAST

Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.

Burglary

MAY 2026
Most likely 5 next month — likely between 0 and 9.
+43% vs 12-month average (≈3.2)

Homicide

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Motor Vehicle Theft

MAY 2026
Most likely 17 next month — likely between 4 and 30.
+23% vs 12-month average (≈13.8)

Other Larceny

MAY 2026
Most likely 12 next month — likely between 6 and 18.
+20% vs 12-month average (≈10.2)

Robbery

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Sexual Assault

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Theft from Vehicle

MAY 2026
Most likely 9 next month — likely between 1 and 16.
+6% vs 12-month average (≈8.3)

Vandalism

MAY 2026
Most likely 7 next month — likely between 1 and 14.
32% vs 12-month average (≈10.3)
06 · Context & comps

How South Park compares

Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”

SPATIAL SPILLOVER · NEW

Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?

When South Park has spiked other larceny historically (15 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 86.7% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.

South Park historical spike-event spillover by crime category (3-month lookahead, adjacent neighborhoods via shared boundary).
CategorySpike eventsSame-category spillover
Theft from vehicle1631.2%
Other larceny1586.7%
Burglary70%

Each row shows South Park's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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.

07 · Patterns

Recurring local terms (last 12 months)

Top terms in incident descriptions for South Park, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.

simplegrandfirearmweaponpettyinjurydeadlyaggravatedaccessoriespartsmorepossessintimatepartnercarryfelonaddictconcealedthreatslessresidentialcourtidentitywithoutalcohol
When does it happen?

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.

HOUR OF DAY · ALL CATEGORIES
025150312am6am12pm6pm11pm

Hour 0 is mildly inflated by reports without a known time defaulting to midnight — see methodology.

DAY OF WEEK · ALL CATEGORIES
05891,178MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
MONTH OF YEAR · ALL CATEGORIES
0357714JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
08 · Methodology

How we built this page

DATA NOTE · LA FEED CHANGE

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.

Read the full LA caveat in methodology →

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.