West Los Angeles Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
West Los Angeles is a Westside neighborhood organized around the Sawtelle and Pico Boulevard corridors, west of the 405 freeway. Anchored by the VA Greater Los Angeles medical campus, the West LA Civic Center, and the Sawtelle Japantown commercial strip.
Two categories moved in West Los Angeles this March — one a single-month below-trend signal, the other a structural shift building over a longer window. The overall picture is split: theft from vehicle is running well below its historical baseline, while burglary has moved in the opposite direction and is registering as a multi-month sustained increase, not just a one-month blip.
Theft from vehicle sits at 96 incidents over the trailing 12 months, against a baseline mean of 132.98 — a meaningful gap below trend and the most prominent signal this briefing. Burglary, meanwhile, has climbed to 59 incidents in the current 12-month window versus 29 in the prior year, a 103.4% increase that reflects a structural shift rather than noise. Every other tracked category — robbery, aggravated assault, other larceny, motor vehicle theft — ran within normal range or continued a longer-running decline.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 96 incidents — about 28% below the 133 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.
- Burglary is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 59, up 103% from 29 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 West Los Angeles compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Del Rey
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above West Los Angeles's 96.
Open page →Panorama City
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above West Los Angeles's 96.
Open page →South Park
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above West Los Angeles's 96.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Los Angeles, 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.