Watts Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Watts is a South LA neighborhood organized around 103rd Street and Central Avenue. Anchored by the Watts Towers (Simon Rodia's folk-art landmark), Ted Watkins Memorial Park, and the Metro A Line's 103rd Street/Watts Towers station.
Four categories moved in Watts this March — one below-trend signal and three sustained structural shifts, all pointing downward. This is not a single quiet month; the dominant pattern is a multi-year reset across violent and property crime categories that has been building across the trailing 12 months.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest move: 145 incidents in the current 12-month window against 271 in the prior year, down 46.5%. Aggravated assault and other larceny both registered as sustained shifts in the same direction — aggravated assault is down 26.2% (203 vs. 275) and other larceny down 27.3% (189 vs. 260) over the same period. Every other tracked category in Watts also ran below its prior-year level, with homicide and sexual assault each down 66.7% on low absolute counts.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 145 incidents — about 47% below the 271 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 145, down 47% from 271 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 189, down 27% from 260 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 203, down 26% from 275 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 Watts 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.”
Granada Hills
142 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Watts's 145.
Open page →Silver Lake
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Watts's 145.
Open page →Chesterfield Square
139 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Watts's 145.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Watts, 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.