Vermont Square Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Vermont Square is a South LA neighborhood organized around the Vermont Square library, one of the original Carnegie libraries in the city. Predominantly Craftsman bungalows on a tight grid.
Vermont Square had a broadly downward month — four below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift across eight tracked categories. The shape is not one loud anomaly but a wide compression: property and violent crime alike are running below their recent baselines, with the sustained shift indicating the pattern predates April.
Robbery is the sharpest single-category move, with the trailing 12 months at 111 incidents against a prior-year total of 140 — down 20.7%. Other larceny has contracted even more severely over the same window, dropping 48.4% (130 vs. 252). Burglary fell 37.0%, from 73 to 46. The remaining categories — aggravated assault, theft from vehicle, motor vehicle theft, vandalism, and sexual assault — were all within range or tracking the same downward direction, none registering a fresh spike.
Notable signals 4
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 111 incidents — about 34% below the 168 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 130 incidents — about 38% below the 208 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 46 incidents — about 55% below the 102 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 270 incidents — about 35% below the 415 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 130, down 48% from 252 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 Vermont Square compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Broadway-Manchester
113 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Vermont Square's 111.
Open page →Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw
115 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Vermont Square's 111.
Open page →Historic South-Central
106 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Vermont Square's 111.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Vermont Square has spiked other larceny 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 9 | 100% |
| Theft from vehicle | 5 | 100% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Vermont Square's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 Vermont Square, 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.