Crime fell in Boyle Heights last month, according to crime tracker Crosstown, matching a larger downward trend in Los Angeles.
The tracker, which sources its data from the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, reported 468 crimes in April 2019, compared to 504 in March.
That April total included 75 reports of vandalism, 67 car thefts, 44 cases of assault and 27 incidents of assault with a deadly weapon. Compared to other neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Boyle Heights’ crime rate ranks 51st out of 230, where a higher ranking denotes a higher crime rate.
Although crime tends to fluctuate based on the time of the year — typically dipping in the winter and rising in the summer months — other data suggest that crime overall has gone down in Boyle Heights since last year. The Los Angeles Times’ crime map shows a total of 1,252 crimes from October 2018 to March 2019, compared to 1,431 over the same period the previous year. That’s a 12% decline.
The Times reported lower crime totals in Boyle Heights compared to Crosstown — 211 in March 2019, compared to Crosstown’s 504. Crosstown is a nonprofit news outlet run by the USC Annenberg School for Journalism.
The dip in crime in Boyle Heights mirrors a citywide trend, according to Crosstown, which found 50,274 crimes reported in Los Angeles in the first quarter of this year — 8% less than the same period last year.
Citywide, burglaries and burglary attempts fell by 13%, and homicides decreased by 15%, the outlet found.
“Factors such as changes in population density and relationships with law enforcement can have a big impact on the crime rates in LA’s neighborhoods,” Vickie Jensen, a criminologist and the department chair of Criminology and Justice Studies at California State University, Northridge, told Crosstown. “If more people decided to move into Playa Vista and that caused a higher population density, that could just statistically create more opportunity for crime.”
