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.
Nine categories moved in Westchester this March — four one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts. The dominant shape is a broad, multi-year contraction across both property crime and violent categories, not a single-month dip.
Motor vehicle theft leads the signals: the current 12-month total is 266 against a prior-year figure of 461, down 42.3% year over year. Burglary and theft from vehicle run in the same direction — burglary at 55 incidents versus 179 the prior 12 months (down 69.3%), theft from vehicle at 328 versus 477 (down 31.2%). With five sustained-shift signals in the mix, these moves reflect structural change across multiple periods, not noise from a single quiet month.
Notable signals 4
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 266 incidents — about 48% below the 515 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 55 incidents — about 76% below the 227 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 328 incidents — about 46% below the 609 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 8 incidents — about 75% below the 32 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 935, down 38% from 1,501 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 55, down 69% from 179 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 266, down 42% from 461 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 197, down 40% from 326 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 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 Westchester compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Sun Valley
270 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Westchester's 266.
Open page →Historic South-Central
272 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Westchester's 266.
Open page →Pacoima
259 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Westchester's 266.
Open page →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
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.