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.
Five signals surfaced in University Park this April — one below-trend month for burglary and four sustained structural shifts spread across property categories. The dominant pattern is not a single anomalous month but a broad, multi-year contraction in property crime across the neighborhood.
Burglary leads the picture: 39 incidents over the current 12 months against 92 in the prior year, down 57.6% — and this month's single-month count ran below even that already-reduced baseline. Theft from vehicle is also carrying a sustained downward shift, 117 incidents vs. 178 the year before, a 34.3% decline. Other larceny rounds out the structural story: 173 incidents against 479 in the prior 12 months, down 63.9%. Motor vehicle theft is the one counter-move, up 26.4% year over year at 330 incidents — the only category running above its prior-year level.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 39 incidents — about 64% below the 107 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 173, down 64% from 479 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 39, down 58% from 92 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 117, down 34% from 178 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 330, up 26% from 261 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 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 University Park 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.”
Brentwood
39 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below University Park's 39.
Open page →Venice
39 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below University Park's 39.
Open page →Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw
38 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below University Park's 39.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When University Park has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (11 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Robbery | 15 | 66.7% |
| Aggravated assault | 14 | 14.3% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 11 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 7 | 100% |
| Theft from vehicle | 5 | 100% |
| Sexual assault | 1 | — 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.