University Park Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
University Park is the South LA neighborhood anchored by USC's University Park campus and the Exposition Park complex — LA Memorial Coliseum, BMO Stadium, the California Science Center, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Bordered by Vermont Square to the south, Pico-Union to the north, and the 110 Freeway to the east.
Four signals emerged in University Park this August, one single-month spike and three sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is not a noisy outlier month but a broad property-crime increase that has been building over the trailing 12 months. Motor vehicle theft registered the sharpest single-month move, while theft from vehicle and other larceny both reflect multi-month structural increases, not one-off fluctuations.
Motor vehicle theft has reached 353 incidents over the current 12 months, up from 170 in the prior year, a 107.6% increase year over year. Theft from vehicle followed a similar arc, 151 incidents against 78 in the prior 12 months, up 93.6%. Other larceny also climbed, 451 vs 275, up 64.0%. The sustained-shift designations on both theft categories mean these are not single noisy months; the volume has been elevated long enough to reflect a structural change, not a seasonal blip.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 353 incidents — about 110% above the 168 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 353, up 108% from 170 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 451, up 64% from 275 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 151, up 94% from 78 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 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 University 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.”
Westchester
341 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below University Park's 353.
Open page →Broadway-Manchester
366 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 above University Park's 353.
Open page →North Hollywood
370 incidents over the past 12 months — 17 above University Park's 353.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
University Parkdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows University Park's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 University Park, 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.