SUSTAINED DROP · BURGLARYAPRIL 2026 BRIEFINGLOS ANGELES · 40.8K residents

West Hills Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles

West Hills is the far western San Fernando Valley neighborhood at the foot of the Santa Susana Mountains, organized around Sherman Way and Valley Circle Boulevard. Anchored by the Orcutt Ranch Horticultural Center and the Bell Canyon community to the west.

BURGLARY · 24-MO COUNT04 2026 · 2
0163112-mo avg: 8.8
WEST HILLSCITYWIDE TREND (RESCALED)-31% 12MO YOY
-71%MoM
-42%12mo YoY
105last 12mo
2this month
01 · TL;DR

Three categories moved in West Hills this April — all three are sustained structural shifts downward, not single-month dips. The pattern is consistent across property crime: burglary, other larceny, and vandalism have each been running below their prior-year baselines for long enough to register as multi-month structural changes, not noise.

Burglary is the sharpest move: 105 incidents in the current 12-month window against 181 in the prior year, down 42.0%. Other larceny is down 37.5% (233 vs. 373), and vandalism is down 27.5% (169 vs. 233). Everything else — robbery flat at 20, aggravated assault down 26.4%, theft from vehicle down 12.9% — fell within range and produced no additional signals this month.

3 sustained shifts
02 · Notable signals

Notable signals 0

Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.

03 · By category

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.

Homicidebelow threshold
2024-052026-04
Robbery0%
2024-052026-04
Aggravated Assault-26%
2024-052026-04
Sexual Assaultbelow threshold
2024-052026-04
Burglary-42%
2024-052026-04
Theft from Vehicle-13%
2024-052026-04
Other Larceny-38%
2024-052026-04
Motor Vehicle Theft-34%
2024-052026-04
Vandalism-28%
2024-052026-04
Arsonbelow threshold
2024-052026-04
05 · Forecast

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

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Arson

NO FORECAST

Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.

Burglary

MAY 2026
Most likely 11 next month — likely between 4 and 20.
+26% vs 12-month average (≈8.8)

Homicide

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Motor Vehicle Theft

MAY 2026
Most likely 8 next month — likely between 4 and 13.
+106% vs 12-month average (≈4.1)

Other Larceny

MAY 2026
Most likely 28 next month — likely between 9 and 45.
+42% vs 12-month average (≈19.4)

Robbery

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Sexual Assault

NO FORECAST

Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.

Theft from Vehicle

MAY 2026
Most likely 13 next month — likely between 4 and 20.
+26% vs 12-month average (≈10.2)

Vandalism

MAY 2026
Most likely 18 next month — likely between 9 and 26.
+25% vs 12-month average (≈14.1)
06 · Context & comps

How West Hills 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.”

SPATIAL SPILLOVER · NEW

Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?

When West Hills has spiked vandalism historically (19 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.

West Hills historical spike-event spillover by crime category (3-month lookahead, adjacent neighborhoods via shared boundary).
CategorySpike eventsSame-category spillover
Vandalism19100%
Theft from vehicle1656.2%
Other larceny1675%
Burglary100%
Motor vehicle theft80%
Robbery3— too few
Aggravated assault1— too few

Each row shows West Hills's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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.

07 · Patterns

Recurring local terms (last 12 months)

Top terms in incident descriptions for West Hills, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.

pettygrandsimplemoreshopliftingresidentialidentitybfmvaccessoriespartsinjurylessfirearmtfmvfalsepretensesintimatepartnerwarrantappearbenchchargefailurepossessdeadly
When does it happen?

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.

HOUR OF DAY · ALL CATEGORIES
021041912am6am12pm6pm11pm

Hour 0 is mildly inflated by reports without a known time defaulting to midnight — see methodology.

DAY OF WEEK · ALL CATEGORIES
0488977MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
MONTH OF YEAR · ALL CATEGORIES
0279558JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
08 · Methodology

How we built this page

DATA NOTE · LA FEED CHANGE

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.

Read the full LA caveat in methodology →

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.