Home Security in Los Angeles: Burglary Numbers, Alarm Permits, and Costs

Burglary in Los Angeles

LAPD publishes its own NIBRS offenses data on the Los Angeles open data portal. For 2025, the first full calendar year on its current records system, it records 11,208 burglary offenses under NIBRS code 220.

We are not publishing a 2023 to 2025 burglary trend for Los Angeles, and we would treat any you see elsewhere with suspicion. LAPD moved to a new records system partway through 2024. Its own NIBRS burglary counts run 37 in January 2024 and 21 in February, then climb to roughly 1,000 a month from May onward. That is a reporting ramp, not a crime wave. The pre-2024 counts come from a records system LAPD has since retired, and a 2024 total built by summing monthly counts out of the FBI's Crime Data Explorer appears to draw on both systems at once. On a like-for-like basis, using only the months where the current system was running, LAPD burglary in 2024 annualizes to roughly 11,400, which is essentially flat against the 11,208 recorded in 2025 rather than the sharp decline a naive year-over-year comparison produces.

For the same reason we are not publishing an LAPD property crime total, or a burglary rate per 100,000, for this window. The monthly property crime series shows the same break: counts drop by roughly three quarters for eight months starting in mid-2024 and then return to prior levels in 2025, which is characteristic of a records system interruption rather than a change in crime. Any LA burglary or property crime trend for 2023 to 2025 you see quoted, from any source drawing on that data, should be treated as unreliable. What we can say plainly is that LAPD recorded 11,208 burglaries in 2025, and that figure is provisional and subject to revision as the department resubmits data.

Los Angeles requires an alarm permit, and response is no longer free

The Los Angeles Office of Finance is blunt about it: you must have an alarm permit, it is the law. An initial permit is $60.00 and the annual renewal is $31.00. You are also required to give your alarm company your permit number and updated emergency contacts, and to post a copy of your permit number on the premises at or near the main entrance so a responding officer can identify your contact information.

The fee structure is what separates LA from the other large cities whose published schedules we checked. Under the revised alarm ordinance the city no longer responds to alarms free of charge, and recovers a $260 fee for service on top of escalating penalties for repeat false alarms. The published schedule, effective May 4, 2026, is:

There is no free first false alarm in Los Angeles at any permit status. That changes the calculus on how many motion sensors you deploy and where. For scale, the Office of Finance states LAPD officers handle 6,000 to 7,000 alarm calls each month and over 90 percent are determined to be false.

If you believe an activation was not false, you may appeal to the Board of Police Commissioners through the LAPD Alarms Section, which publishes the appeal process and the printable forms.

What home security costs in Los Angeles

Equipment and monitoring are priced nationally. What changes locally is the permit and false alarm overhead described above. As of August 2026, SimpliSafe's published monitoring plans run 33 cents a day for self monitoring with camera recordings (about $10 a month), 76 cents a day for Standard professional monitoring (about $23 a month), $1.10 a day for Core (about $33 a month), and $1.66 to $2.66 a day for the Pro and Pro Plus tiers. Those are list prices from SimpliSafe's own plan page rather than promotional rates. SimpliSafe was running an Anniversary Sale that was ending around this date, so a lower number quoted elsewhere is probably a promotion with an expiry attached, and it is worth checking what the price reverts to. Other national providers ladder similarly.

Home security cost per month breaks down the full annual cost stack including equipment, monitoring, and the extras that get added later, and cheapest professional monitoring ranks the budget monitored plans by published pricing. If you are still deciding whether to pay for dispatch at all, is professional monitoring worth it walks the trade-off, and DIY vs professional monitoring cost does the arithmetic over a few years.

If you decide monitoring is worth paying for, our short questionnaire at /quote fetches real quotes from professional monitoring providers for your address. In LA, factor the $60 initial permit and $31 annual renewal into the first-year total, and treat the $260 first false alarm fee as a real risk cost rather than a footnote.

A sensible setup for a Los Angeles home

LA's fee structure argues for a specific design: high confidence detection on real entry points, minimal speculative motion coverage, and a verification layer before anything summons a police response. When the first false alarm costs $260, a sensor that fires on a cat once a quarter is not a minor annoyance, it is a line item.

Concretely: entry sensors on exterior doors and reachable windows, which fire on a specific physical event; a camera or two covering the same openings so you can see what triggered a signal before escalating; and motion sensors used sparingly and placed away from pets, vents, and direct sun. Pet-friendly motion sensors are close to mandatory here if you have animals. Plans that include video verification, where a monitoring centre looks at footage before requesting dispatch, are worth more in Los Angeles than in cities with a free-alarm allowance, because they cut the odds of paying for a response to nothing.

Physical measures still do the heaviest lifting and generate no fees at all: deadbolts and reinforced strike plates, sliding door blocks (LA's housing stock is full of them), window locks, and lighting. Do security signs deter burglars covers the deterrence evidence. If you rent, home security for renters covers the no-modification options, and if you are weighing whether to pay for dispatch at all given the per-response fees, is professional monitoring worth it is the piece to read next.