The Detective: Suspect is Dad’s girlfriend

Here are some recent anomalies in LAPD data found by the Detective, our data-crawling robot, and aggregated by the robot’s human assistant, Kate Lý Johnston.

? Be wary of family members … and their significant others.

At 6:20 a.m. on Feb. 5, an incident occurred where the suspect was arrested for violating a restraining order and committing an act of domestic violence against a 42-year-old Hispanic male. The suspect? The girlfriend of the victim’s father.

According to LAPD data, there was a restraining order between the male victim and his dad’s girlfriend. But this didn’t stop her from coming to his home on the 3600 block of Trinity St. in Historic South Central.

Restraining order violations are quite common in the City of Los Angeles – there were at least four cases on Feb. 5 alone. On the other hand, there have only been 83 instances of the MO Code “suspect was father’s girlfriend” since 2010. This was the first one this year.

? Public officials – they have problems too. 

At 11:05 a.m. on Feb. 12, a student assaulted a public official at a high school in Reseda.

It’s unclear exactly which public official was hurt, but the victim was a 42-year-old white male, according to LAPD data. The student grabbed, pushed and shouted racial slurs at him at a high school located on the 8100 block of Vanalden Ave., the address of Cleveland High School.

While assaults happen all the time, there have only been three reported incidents of public officials who have been assaulted so far in 2020, and only 87 instances in total since 2010. 

? Some disguises are scarier than others.

At 10:15 a.m. on Feb. 16, a hooded suspect robbed a 61-year-old Hispanic male at gunpoint at the intersection of Eton St. and Community St. in Canoga Park. Aside from the hood and gun, the suspect donned another item: a cloth (with eyeholes).

MO Code 0203, “cloth (with eyeholes),” is surprisingly rare in LAPD data.  There have been only 59 instances of people wearing one since 2010, and this was the first case in 2020. Perhaps suspects go for scarier disguises nowadays.

How we did it: We have a robot on the team called the Detective that scans the LAPD publicly available data for anomalies. LAPD officers tag most crime reports in their system with MO codes, for “modus operandi,” Latin for operating method or style. The MO codes are shorthand for describing what happened in a crime incident.

There is a lag of about two weeks between when incidents occur and when the data becomes publicly available.

Interested in our data? Email us at askus@xtown.la.