Winnetka Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Winnetka is a western San Fernando Valley neighborhood between Canoga Park and Reseda, organized around Sherman Way and Winnetka Avenue. Predominantly mid-century single-family ranch homes.
Four categories moved in Winnetka this March briefing — three ran below trend in a single month, and one registered as a sustained multi-month structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward across both violent and property crime, with no spikes in the mix.
Sexual assault leads the tracked signals: the current 12-month total is 11 incidents against a prior-year count of 34, down 67.6% year-over-year. Robbery and theft from vehicle also ran below trend this month; robbery is down 14.0% over the trailing 12 months (37 vs. 43), and theft from vehicle is down 17.6% (220 vs. 267). Motor vehicle theft, not among the top three signals this month, still shows the sharpest 12-month volume change of any category in the neighborhood at -29.9% — 164 incidents against 234 the prior year.
Notable signals 3
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 11 incidents — about 61% below the 28 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 37 incidents — about 27% below the 51 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 220 incidents — about 21% below the 280 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 164, down 30% from 234 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 Winnetka compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month sexual assault 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 sexual assault levels.”
Arlington Heights
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Winnetka's 11.
Open page →Watts
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Winnetka's 11.
Open page →Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw
12 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Winnetka's 11.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Winnetka, 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.