Van Nuys Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Van Nuys is a central San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around the Van Nuys Boulevard commercial corridor and the Van Nuys Civic Center. Anchored by Van Nuys Airport, the Sepulveda Basin recreation area to the south, and a long Metro Orange Line (G Line) bus rapid-transit corridor.
Four categories moved in Van Nuys this March — two one-month below-trend signals and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime, with the sustained shifts pointing to changes that predate this month.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest signal: the trailing 12-month total of 413 sits well below the multi-year baseline of 722.6, and theft from vehicle is also running below trend at 564 incidents vs. 715 in the prior year, down 21.1%. Sexual assault has posted a sustained decrease — 48 incidents over the current 12 months against 82 in the year before, a 41.5% reduction — marking a structural shift rather than a single quiet month. Aggravated assault, at 403 incidents against 387 the prior year, was the one category that moved in the other direction, though it did not cross the signal threshold this month.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 413 incidents — about 43% below the 723 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 564 incidents — about 26% below the 764 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 413, down 46% from 764 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Sexual Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 48, down 42% from 82 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 March 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 Van Nuys 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.”
Boyle Heights
396 incidents over the past 12 months — 17 below Van Nuys's 413.
Open page →Koreatown
454 incidents over the past 12 months — 41 above Van Nuys's 413.
Open page →Florence
457 incidents over the past 12 months — 44 above Van Nuys's 413.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Van Nuys, 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
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, 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.