It’s hard to say what direction crime is heading in Los Angeles these days.
The police department stopped posting crime numbers on its public website after implementing a new record-keeping system and changing how it tallies thefts, assaults and other crimes.
Officials say the change gives them a more accurate picture of security levels citywide, and efforts are underway to make the statistics available online again, but for months they have had no easy way to track crime trends across the city.
Police continue to provide updated numbers to city officials upon request, and Interim Chief Dominic Choi provides weekly crime updates to the Police Commission.
The department used to release a weekly crime report that included a citywide breakdown of crimes and arrests across all categories of violent and property crimes for the previous week and so far this year, but the familiar multi-colored charts have since disappeared from the department’s website.
The Los Angeles Police Department added a disclaimer to the crime page on its website about the department’s move to a National Incident-Based Reporting System, which brings police departments in line with federal guidelines aimed at capturing more detailed crime data.
“We hope to have both the open data portal and crime statistics up and running within the next few months,” CompStat’s Lt. Christopher Chase said in an email to The Times. “It’s a lot of work, but we have a lot of great people working on it!”
During his latest briefing on Tuesday, Choi highlighted figures showing that overall violent crime, including murder, robbery, rape and serious assault, remained essentially unchanged from the same period last year, while property crimes were down about 3 percent.
Choi told the committee that while non-fatal shootings are down citywide, homicides are up about 11% compared to the first half of 2023. Choi said there’s no single reason for this, saying “there’s no trend toward gang warfare or specific racial conflict.” The increase in bloodshed bucks a trend in which homicides have declined in many major U.S. cities this year.
Of the LAPD’s four area divisions, South Los Angeles has seen the most homicides this year, with 47, 14 more than the same period in 2023. Worryingly, Chey said the city has also seen an increase in robberies of about 18 percent, or 585, compared to the same period last year, with the biggest increases seen in the Rampart, Southwest and Wilshire areas.
The Downtown area saw the largest increase in commercial thefts, up 106 from the first half of last year, a roughly 15% increase. Residential thefts are also up, particularly in the Wilshire and Hollywood areas, while the Foothills area saw one of the fastest increases in vehicle thefts, up 153 from the first half of last year.
Criminologists and others who study crime have long warned about the reliability of statistics released by police agencies, saying the figures can be manipulated for political purposes and often offer a narrow view of the ebb and flow of violent crime, which has been declining for decades.
As part of an effort to promote transparency and uniformity, police departments across the country are gradually moving to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which began in 1988 and is supposed to collect data on a broader range of crimes.
The LAPD is one of the last big-city police agencies to make this leap, said Liberty Bitart, a data science professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
The old system only records the most serious crime that occurred during an incident, which could result in some crimes being missed. For example, in a robbery-murder case, only the murder is recorded. The FBI system counts both acts separately.
While most agencies that have switched to the system report “growing pains,” Vittato said it’s odd that the LAPD would stop reporting annual crime statistics. Despite their limitations, he said, the reports remain an important source of information for the public and elected officials.
It’s not hard to “do a year-to-year comparison” of the LAPD’s old and new systems, Vittert said. “You’re not comparing apples to oranges. It’s more like comparing red apples to green apples.”
The statistics reporting issues first emerged in early March when the Los Angeles Police Department unveiled a new records-keeping system that police officials said would replace several outdated computer programs. Officers in the Central Division were the first to use the new system.
Officials said the changes also include going paperless, allowing officers to fill out crime reports and scene cards on native iPhone applications developed by Motorola for police. Previously, officers had to return to the station to type up reports, a time-consuming process that kept officers from being on the streets, said John McMahon, deputy director of the Department of Information and Technology.
McMahon acknowledged there would be “challenges” as the department adjusted to the new way of doing things, but said ultimately the system would improve efficiency and productivity.
Department officials said they had conducted on-site inspections in Philadelphia and New York, where both cities also recently updated their records systems.
But the change has also been met with skepticism from police critics, one of whom argued at a commission meeting this year that the “aggregation” of different data sources has historically been used to justify further over-policing of communities of color.
“We need to ask ourselves: Who is this efficiency helping? What purpose does it serve?” Matios Kidane of the LAPD Counter Espionage Coalition said at a March meeting.