West Adams Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
West Adams is a South LA neighborhood organized around the Adams Boulevard corridor between USC and Crenshaw. Anchored by the historic Mansions of West Adams (a National Register district), Mount Saint Mary's University Doheny Campus, and the Metro E Line's Expo/Crenshaw station.
Four signals surfaced in West Adams this April — two one-month below-trend readings and two sustained structural shifts. The shape is broadly downward across property crime, with burglary dominating both the short-term and longer-term picture.
Burglary accounts for two of the four signals: a single-month drop and a sustained multi-year shift lower, with the trailing 12-month total at 20 against a prior-year count of 40 — down 50.0%. Motor vehicle theft also ran below trend this month, and its 12-month total of 93 is down 19.1% against the prior year's 115. Other tracked categories, including theft from vehicle (down 20.2%) and vandalism (down 22.8%), are also well below prior-year levels, though they did not cross the signal threshold this month.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 69% below the 65 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 93 incidents — about 40% below the 155 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 67, down 46% from 125 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 20, down 50% from 40 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 West Adams 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.”
Montecito Heights
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below West Adams's 20.
Open page →Pacific Palisades
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below West Adams's 20.
Open page →Palms
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below West Adams's 20.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When West Adams has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (8 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 75% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Theft from vehicle | 18 | 55.6% |
| Other larceny | 9 | 55.6% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 8 | 75% |
Each row shows West Adams's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 West Adams, 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.