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 in April 2026 — one below-trend signal and three sustained structural shifts, all running downward. The dominant pattern is not a quiet month but a multi-year reconfiguration: aggravated assault, other larceny, and motor vehicle theft have all reset to lower baselines over the trailing 12 months, not just dipped in a single period.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest move: 145 incidents in the current 12-month window against a prior-year count of 263, down 44.9%. Aggravated assault dropped 25.8% (204 vs. 275) and other larceny dropped 26.3% (193 vs. 262) — both classified as sustained shifts, meaning the lower level has held across multiple months. The rest of the tracked categories were within their normal ranges this month, but the broader 12-month picture for Watts is consistently lower across violent and property crime.
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 45% from 263 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 204, down 26% from 275 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 193, down 26% from 262 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 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
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Watts's 145.
Open page →Silver Lake
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Watts's 145.
Open page →Winnetka
150 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Watts's 145.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Watts has spiked other larceny historically (18 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 0% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 18 | 0% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 12 | 0% |
| Sexual assault | 7 | 0% |
| Robbery | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Watts's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 1 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 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
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.