Westlake Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Westlake is a Central LA neighborhood organized around MacArthur Park and the Wilshire Boulevard corridor west of Downtown. Anchored by the historic Westlake Theatre, the MacArthur Park lake, and the Metro B/D Line's Westlake/MacArthur Park station.
Seven categories moved in Westlake in April 2026 — four ran below trend for the month and three registered as sustained structural shifts. The dominant pattern is a broad, multi-category decline across both violent and property crime, not a single outlier pulling down the numbers.
Burglary is the sharpest signal: 66 incidents over the current 12 months against a prior-year total of 170, a -61.2% drop. Motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle also ran below trend, down -33.1% and -11.4% respectively on a 12-month basis. Other Larceny (-45.6%), Sexual Assault (-24.1%), and Vandalism (-19.3%) round out the broader picture — with every tracked category in Westlake lower than the prior year, the three sustained-shift signals suggest this isn't just a quiet month but a structural change taking hold.
Notable signals 4
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 66 incidents — about 78% below the 294 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 446 incidents — about 39% below the 728 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 630 incidents — about 16% below the 754 average from prior years.
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 400 incidents — about 52% below the 835 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 400, down 46% from 735 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 66, down 61% from 170 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 446, down 33% from 667 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 Westlake 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.”
Historic South-Central
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Westlake's 66.
Open page →Hollywood Hills West
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Westlake's 66.
Open page →Valley Village
64 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Westlake's 66.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Westlake has spiked other larceny historically (13 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 30 | 66.7% |
| Burglary | 16 | 81.2% |
| Other larceny | 13 | 100% |
| Homicide | 6 | 16.7% |
| Vandalism | 3 | — too few |
| Sexual assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Westlake's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 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 Westlake, 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.