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 April — one a single-month below-trend signal, one a structural multi-year shift. The shape is mixed: property crime is pulling in opposite directions, with theft running well below its historical baseline while burglary has climbed steadily enough to register as a sustained shift, not just a noisy month.
Theft from vehicle is the month's most prominent signal, with a 12-month total of 86 incidents against a baseline mean of 132.42 — down 16.5% versus the prior 12 months. Burglary tells the opposite story: 63 incidents over the current 12 months against 29 in the year before, a 117.2% increase that reflects a longer structural move, not a one-month anomaly. The remaining categories — robbery, aggravated assault, other larceny, motor vehicle theft — all ran below their prior-year levels and within expected range.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 86 incidents — about 35% below the 132 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 63, up 117% 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 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 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.”
Harvard Heights
86 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below West Los Angeles's 86.
Open page →Panorama City
87 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above West Los Angeles's 86.
Open page →Brentwood
84 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below West Los Angeles's 86.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When West Los Angeles has spiked motor vehicle theft historically (8 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 12.5% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Motor vehicle theft | 8 | 12.5% |
| Aggravated assault | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows West Los Angeles's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 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
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.