Sylmar Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Sylmar is the northernmost San Fernando Valley neighborhood at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, organized around Foothill Boulevard. Anchored by the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, the Veterans Memorial Park, and the historic San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery.
Ten tracked signals surfaced in Sylmar this April — five one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts, all pointing in the same direction. The shape of the month is a broad, multi-category property crime decline, not a single outlier.
Motor vehicle theft is the most prominent signal: the current 12-month total of 86 incidents compares against a baseline mean of 342.26 — a structural collapse, not a monthly dip. Burglary and other larceny follow the same pattern, with 12-month totals down 49.5% and 51.0% respectively against the prior year. Robbery and aggravated assault also fell over the trailing 12 months — down 28.6% and 16.5% — and every other category in the property crime set ran below its prior-year range. Sexual assault and arson moved slightly above prior-year levels, but both remain low-volume categories.
Notable signals 5
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 86 incidents — about 75% below the 342 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 49 incidents — about 55% below the 109 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 97 incidents — about 52% below the 204 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 81 incidents — about 77% below the 348 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 123 incidents — about 38% below the 198 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 86, down 71% from 297 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 81, down 65% from 234 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 123, down 48% from 235 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 97, down 51% from 198 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 Sylmar 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.”
Tarzana
86 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Sylmar's 86.
Open page →Panorama City
85 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sylmar's 86.
Open page →Palms
88 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sylmar's 86.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Sylmar has spiked aggravated assault historically (9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 9 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 7 | 100% |
| Burglary | 3 | — too few |
| Robbery | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Sylmar's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 Sylmar, 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.