Crime in Los Angeles is on a downward trend

The first 10 months of 2019 fit right into the trend across the City of Los Angeles of declining crime numbers.

There were 178,860 total crimes reported to the LAPD from Jan. 1 – Oct. 31, 2019, a 6% decrease from the same period the year before.

Across the city, 92 neighborhoods saw overall crime go down from the first 10 months of 2018. 17 neighborhoods saw an increase in crime, and one neighborhood saw no difference at all.

Though overall crime is down in the city, not all crime categories have fallen. Los Angeles had a 3% increase in the number of murders during the first 10 months of the year, bringing the total to 218 at the end of October.

“While we are pleased at the overall [year-to-date] crime levels in Los Angeles, we are always watching trends in specific categories,” said LAPD spokesperson Joshua Rubenstein. “The Los Angeles Police Department has doubled down on a combination of smart policing, community engagement, and new technologies to battle violent crime.”

The neighborhoods that saw the sharpest decline in reported crimes were Lakeview Terrace (-22%), West Los Angeles (-20%) and Bel-Air (-24%). Elysian Valley, Playa Del Rey and Chinatown took the top three spots for highest increases in crime rates for that period, with increases of 25%, 17% and 13%, respectively. 

In West Los Angeles, crime has dropped 20% between the first 10 months of 2018 and 2019. Jamie Keeton, the Chair of the West Los Angeles Sawtelle Neighborhood Council (WLASNC), believes this drop might be explained by a responsive police force and an engaged community.

“These days, residents are a lot more active on Nextdoor, with reporting things like package thefts in particular. For better or for worse, vigilance has been higher these days,” Keeton explained. “I’ve never thought of this neighborhood as unsafe.”

According to Keeton, West Los Angeles has also been changing its approach to homelessness.

“The place I live has a steady supply of homeless people because we’re right next to VA [Veteran Affairs Medical Center]. We recently passed a bill to expand permanent supportive housing, which people were super concerned about,” Keeton said. “Our Senior Lead Officer has been very involved in homeless encampments, and making sure people and homeowners are okay, since he came on board 2-3 years ago.”

Crime in Los Angeles has been a mixed bag since 2010, the year that the Los Angeles Police Department first started recording crime data. 

There was a decline in crime reports from 2010 to 2014, but 2015 saw a sharp increase in reports that lasted till 2017, which saw the highest numbers on record. Crime has since been on the decline.

But across the city, people’s experiences with safety vary dramatically. We’ve examined crimes reported to the LAPD for 110 neighborhoods and ranked them by crime rate. (Crime rate is determined by dividing the number of crimes by the number of inhabitants, then multiplying by 100,000.) 

Since the first six months of 2019, Downtown has continued to dominate the crime-rate charts, with a rate of 24,003 per 100,000 people, or almost one reported crime for every four residents. Even though Downtown didn’t have the highest crime increase, the neighborhood experienced one of the highest concentrations of per capita crime rates in the city. 

Downtown is unlike any other neighborhood in the city, however, because it is the center of so much commercial activity and also has the largest population of people experiencing homelessness. 

The runner-up, Vermont Square, had a substantially lower per capita rate of 10,557 per 100,000 people, or about one reported crime for every 10 residents.

Arleta, Mount Washington, and Bel Air now have the three lowest per capita crime rates in the city of Los Angeles, at 1,951, 1,951 and 1,904 per 100,000 people, respectively.

Click on the arrows in the table to sort by category. Click once to see the category in ascending order, and again to see it in descending order. Use the search bar to find your neighborhood. (The number column refers to alphabetical order.)

How we did it: We looked at LAPD publicly available data on all reported crimes from 2010. For neighborhood boundaries, we rely on the borders defined by the Los Angeles Times. Learn more about our data here.

LAPD data only reflects crimes that are reported to the department, not how many crimes actually occurred. In making our calculations, we rely on the data that the LAPD makes publicly available. On occasion, LAPD may update past crime reports with new information, or recategorize past reports. Those revised reports do not always automatically become part of the public database.

Want to know how your neighborhood fares? Or simply just interested in our data? Email us at askus@xtown.la.