70+ Los Angeles Property Crime Statistics (2026)

Last Updated: August 2026

The Los Angeles Police Department recorded 122,686 offenses classified as crimes against property inside the City of Los Angeles during calendar year 2025 — an average of 336 a day — and only 8.3 percent of them carry a case status showing an arrest (LAPD NIBRS Offenses Dataset, 2024–2025, queried 2 August 2026). These Los Angeles property crime statistics are compiled from the LAPD’s own incident-level open data, the FBI Crime Data Explorer, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with every figure linked to the primary dataset that produced it.

Los Angeles Property Crime Statistics at a Glance

Two systems measure property crime in this city, and the Los Angeles property crime statistics they produce count different things. The LAPD publishes incident-level records under the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, where “crimes against property” includes vandalism, fraud, robbery and every larceny category. The FBI Crime Data Explorer publishes the narrower summary measure — burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson. Both are primary. Neither is wrong. They simply answer different questions, and mixing them produces the inflated numbers that circulate in secondary roundups.

LAPD Recorded 122,686 Property Offenses in 2025

Grand theft auto is the largest single penal-code offense category in Los Angeles, at 17,779 recorded offenses in 2025. Felony vandalism above 400 dollars is second at 14,342, and burglary from a motor vehicle third at 10,956. Together those three categories account for 43,077 offenses – more than a third of every property offense the LAPD logged all year.

The distribution matters for anyone deciding where to put a guard. Los Angeles property crime is not dominated by forced entry into buildings — residential burglary accounts for 5,418 offenses and non-residential burglary for 2,972. It is dominated by theft from and of vehicles standing in open space, and by damage to property that nobody was watching.

Los Angeles Property Crime Runs 45 Percent Above the National Rate

Using the FBI’s summary definition — the only measure that is directly comparable across jurisdictions — the LAPD reported a property crime rate of 2,252.06 per 100,000 residents in 2025. The national rate that year was 1,549.89 and the California rate was 1,819.86. Los Angeles therefore sits 45.3 percent above the national figure and 23.7 percent above the rest of its own state.

California as a whole recorded 715,921 property offenses in 2025 against 81,144 clearances. That is a statewide clearance rate of 11.3 percent, itself well below the national clearance rate of 17.4 percent implied by the same dataset.

Roughly One in Twelve Property Offenses Ends in an Arrest

Of the 122,686 property offenses LAPD recorded in 2025, 10,237 carry a case status indicating a clearance by arrest — 8.3 percent. A further 85,255 sit at “Investigation Continued” and 22,338 remain simply “Open.” Under the FBI’s narrower summary measure the LAPD figure is lower still: 5,482 clearances against 87,256 offenses, or 6.3 percent.

Clearance rates are the least understood of the Los Angeles property crime statistics, and for a property owner the practical reading is blunt. Reporting a property crime in Los Angeles produces an arrest in fewer than one case in ten, and recovery of stolen property is rarer than that. Deterrence and interruption happen before the report, not after it.

Vehicles Are the Target in 34.9 Percent of Los Angeles Property Crime

Three FBI NIBRS offense codes cover crime that targets a vehicle: 240 motor vehicle theft, 23F theft from a motor vehicle, and 23G theft of vehicle parts or accessories. Together they account for 42,815 offenses in 2025 — 34.9 percent of all recorded property crime in the city. No other cluster comes close.

That concentration is the reason a mobile presence outperforms a fixed post on most multi-building sites. Vehicles sit unattended in predictable places for predictable stretches, which is exactly the exposure that marked vehicle patrol and foot and bike patrol are built to compress.

Where Property Crime Happens: The Premise Breakdown

The LAPD records a premise type on every incident, which makes this the most operationally useful cut of the Los Angeles property crime statistics. After the street itself, parking lots and garages are the single most victimised location in Los Angeles — 12,206 property offenses in 2025, rising to 13,718 once underground and building parking is added. That is 11.2 percent of all property crime in the city occurring on surfaces that most owners treat as an afterthought.

Inside parking lots, garages and drop lots the pattern is overwhelmingly vehicular: 3,996 thefts from a vehicle and 3,088 vehicle thefts, with the three vehicle-target NIBRS codes making up 62.9 percent of the 12,206 offenses recorded there. Vandalism accounts for a further 2,484.

Those premise counts map directly onto the site types Los Angeles owners hire for: parking lots and structures, apartment and gated communities, shopping centres and retail, warehouse and industrial sites and construction sites. A construction site count of 294 looks small next to a parking figure of 12,206 until you weigh it per site — there are far fewer active construction sites in the city than parking lots.

Nearly Half of Property Crime Happens Between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Timestamping every 2025 offense by hour of occurrence puts 60,599 of 122,686 — 49.4 percent — in the twelve hours from 6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m. The single worst hour is the 6 p.m. hour, at 7,849 offenses, and the quietest is the 5 a.m. hour at 2,435.

That is close to an even split across a period when most commercial premises are unstaffed, which is why overnight and swing-shift coverage is priced differently from daytime coverage across Los Angeles security guard services.

Property Crime Fell 25.9 Percent in the First Half of 2026

The freshest of the Los Angeles property crime statistics come from a separate 2026 dataset the LAPD publishes alongside the historical file. Comparing the same six-month window in both years, property offenses fell from 63,647 in January to June 2025 to 47,192 in January to June 2026 — a decline of 25.9 percent. Motor vehicle theft fell 33.8 percent over the same window and parking-lot offenses fell 34.1 percent.

One caveat belongs on that number. Recent months are still accruing late reports, so the most recent weeks understate the true count and the real decline is probably somewhat smaller than 25.9 percent. The January figure, seven months old at the time of extraction, already shows a 21.7 percent fall, which suggests the direction is genuine even if the magnitude tightens.

Nearly Seven in Ten Property Crimes Are Never Reported to Police

Every figure above counts reported crime only. The Bureau of Justice Statistics measures the gap directly through the National Crime Victimization Survey, and in 2024 just 30.5 percent of property victimizations nationally were reported to police, up marginally from 29.9 percent in 2023. Urban households experienced property crime at 181.6 incidents per 1,000 households that year, against 96.1 in suburban and 48.3 in rural areas.

Applied to Los Angeles that means the LAPD’s 122,686 recorded offenses represent a floor, not a total. It also means a property owner’s own incident log is often a better measure of exposure than any published crime rate.

Los Angeles Employs 83,280 Security Guards

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 83,280 people employed as security guards in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area in its May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. That is 6.5 percent of the entire United States security guard workforce of 1,283,470, and second only to the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro at 142,760.

The concentration figure is the more revealing one. Los Angeles has 13.28 security guards per 1,000 jobs and a location quotient of 1.61 — meaning guards make up 61 percent more of local employment than they do nationally.

What the Los Angeles Property Crime Statistics Mean for Property Owners

Three findings on this page have direct operational consequences, and none of them require guessing.

1. Coverage should follow the premise table, not intuition. Parking surfaces carry 13,718 offenses a year in the city — more than apartments, retail and warehouses combined. A patrol route that treats the lot as the last stop has the ranking backwards.
2. Coverage should follow the clock. With 49.4 percent of offenses falling between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., the hours a site is unstaffed are the hours it is most exposed. A daytime-only post leaves half the risk unaddressed.
3. Post-incident response is the weakest lever available. An 8.3 percent arrest clearance rate means the criminal justice system resolves fewer than one property offense in ten. Whatever reduces loss has to act before the report is filed.

Guardian National Security builds Los Angeles coverage around exactly those three inputs: premise type, exposure window, and the site’s own incident history. Shifts are GPS-tracked, guards are BSIS-licensed and trained by retired police officers, and clients receive daily activity reports. Rates are published openly and matched against any competitor quote.

“The clearance data is the part owners underestimate. Fewer than one property offense in ten ends in an arrest in this city, so the entire return on a security budget sits in the hours before something happens — which premise you cover, and which hours you cover it. The LAPD’s own premise and time-of-day fields tell you both, for free.”

— Isaac Roberts, Security Specialist, Guardian National Security. BSIS-licensed, PPO #120268. Guardian National Security has completed 10,000+ deployments across 15+ industries since 1997. BBB A+ accredited, CALSAGA member.

For a breakdown of coverage models and what each costs across the region, see Guardian’s Los Angeles security guard services overview, the Los Angeles security guard cost estimator, and the wider armed and unarmed guard services page. Common questions are answered on the security guard services FAQ hub.

Methodology and Source Notes

Every figure on this page was pulled directly from the issuing agency’s own dataset or publication on 2 August 2026. No aggregator, industry roundup or secondary summary was used, and no figure was estimated or modelled.

LAPD counts were computed from the LAPD NIBRS Offenses Dataset using the date of occurrence field, filtered to a NIBRS classification of Crimes Against Property. Vehicle totals were grouped by the trailing FBI NIBRS offense code on each record – 240, 23F and 23G – rather than by penal-code wording, because the same offence appears under many different wordings and text matching both misses records and double counts them. The 2024 to 2025 dataset was last updated on 23 July 2026; the 2026 to Present dataset was last updated on 21 July 2026 and covers incidents through 11 July 2026.

Three limitations affect how these Los Angeles property crime statistics should be read. First, LAPD moved to NIBRS reporting on 7 March 2024, so 2024 is a partial NIBRS year and is not compared against 2025 anywhere on this page. Second, NIBRS counts each offense within an incident separately, so NIBRS totals run higher than the FBI summary totals for the same city and the two must never be added together. Third, all police data counts reported crime only.

Rates and clearances quoted against California and national figures come from the FBI Crime Data Explorer summarized property-crime series for agency ORI CA0194200. Reporting-rate figures come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey. Employment and wage figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, reference period May 2025.

Last verified: 2 August 2026. This page is re-verified against its primary sources every quarter, and immediately whenever the LAPD, the FBI or the Bureau of Justice Statistics issues a new annual release.

Los Angeles Property Crime Statistics: Frequently Asked Questions

Using This Data on Your Own Property

The Los Angeles property crime statistics on this page are free to cite with attribution, and the underlying datasets are open to anyone who wants to run the same queries against their own ZIP code or LAPD reporting district. The premise and time-of-occurrence fields are the two most useful columns for a property owner, because together they describe exposure rather than aftermath.

If you want that analysis applied to a specific address in Los Angeles County, Guardian National Security will scope coverage against the site’s premise type, its exposure hours and its own incident history. Request a security guard quote or contact Guardian National Security directly. Every quote carries a price-match guarantee against any competing bid.