Westchester Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Westchester is a Westside neighborhood adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport, organized around Sepulveda Boulevard and Manchester Avenue. Anchored by Loyola Marymount University, Otis College of Art and Design, and a long stretch of mid-century single-family ranch homes.
Three categories moved in Westchester in July 2026: one one-month spike and two sustained structural shifts pulling in opposite directions. The spike is in vandalism; the structural moves are burglary falling and theft from vehicle rising, a split that defines the neighborhood's property crime picture right now.
Burglary is down 28.0% over the trailing 12 months, 152 incidents against 211 in the prior year, and the sustained-shift signal indicates this is a multi-month pattern, not a single quiet stretch. Theft from vehicle is moving the other way, up 54.3% year over year, 449 incidents against 291, and is also reading as a structural increase rather than a one-month noise event. Vandalism's 12-month total of 325 sits well above its prior-year count of 322, a marginal annual difference, but the spike signal means the most recent month landed sharply above the multi-year baseline.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 325 incidents — about 37% above the 237 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.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 449, up 54% from 291 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 152, down 28% from 211 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 July 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 Westchester compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Canoga Park
325 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Westchester's 325.
Open page →Venice
323 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Westchester's 325.
Open page →Valley Glen
316 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Westchester's 325.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Westchesterdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Westchester'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 Westchester, 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.