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.
Ten categories moved in Westchester this April — five one-month below-trend signals and five sustained structural shifts. The overall picture is a broad, multi-year pullback across property crime, not a single-month anomaly. Every tracked category is down against the prior 12 months, and the sustained-shift count confirms the pattern has been in place long enough to count as a structural change.
Burglary leads the signals: the current 12-month total is 40 incidents against a prior-year total of 175, a 77.1% reduction. Motor vehicle theft is down 41.9% (257 vs. 442) and theft from vehicle down 30.0% (319 vs. 456). Outside those three, robbery is down 28.8%, other larceny down 39.3%, and vandalism down 41.5% — all categories running well below where they were a year ago.
Notable signals 5
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 40 incidents — about 82% below the 226 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 257 incidents — about 50% below the 513 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 319 incidents — about 47% below the 606 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 9 incidents — about 72% below the 32 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 47 incidents — about 42% below the 81 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 882, down 39% from 1,453 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 40, down 77% from 175 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 257, down 42% from 442 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 190, down 42% from 325 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 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 Westchester 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.”
Brentwood
39 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Westchester's 40.
Open page →University Park
39 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Westchester's 40.
Open page →Venice
39 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Westchester's 40.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Westchester has spiked burglary historically (17 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 64.7% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 21 | 61.9% |
| Burglary | 17 | 64.7% |
| Vandalism | 11 | 36.4% |
| Robbery | 6 | 0% |
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.