L.A. Walks
Violent Crimes in Los Angeles
Violent Crimes in Los Angeles
Los Angeles is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It is one of the main tourist attractions because it is the center of the nation’s film and television industry. Additionally, it is also a city of many sightseeing spots and entertainment. However, despite how blooming Los Angeles can be, it is also the hub of many violent crimes. Some examples of crimes that have occurred include:
Hot Spots of Violent Crimes in L.A. within Neighborhood Boundaries
Hot Spots of Criminal Homicides
Many of the homicides took place around the central parts of L.A, East L.A., and SouthEast L.A.
Hot Spots of Assaults with a Deadly Weapon
Hot Spots of Attempted Rape and Forcible Rape
Hot Spots of Robberies
Figure 1: Map of hot and cold spots in L.A.
In 2020, there was a noticeable rise in crime rates in Los Angeles. Our objective was to identify where they were concentrated in and throughout the city. Crimes such as murder, assault, and other disturbing criminal acts were shocking and likely shocking to many others who consider this city their home. By creating a map, we can determine where specific crimes have occurred. This hot spot map displays the crimes from different neighborhood council boundaries.
Figure 2: Assault & Battery, Burglary, Criminal Homicide, Other Assault, Robbery, Sexual Assault.
Included below is a link to a dataset published by the LA Almanac comprised of data regarding Reported Violent Crimes for 2020 sourced from preliminary data from each police jurisdiction notating the number of violent crimes committed. This data is particularly useful in displaying some of the critical information provided by the California Department of Justice on violent crime in the Los Angeles County Area to include crimes such as homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. While there are a whole host of other crimes committed frequently within Los Angeles County, we chose to focus our efforts on highlighting some of the more egregious acts being committed on LA streets that present a real danger to residents of Los Angeles County and affect pedestrians or those lacking personal transportation the most. This dataset is relevant to our research because it provides an easy to read data set displaying the breakdown of each of the four aforementioned crimes that is backed up by the data displayed on each of our included maps.
At the end of 2020, Chicago police reported more than 750 murders, a jump of more than 50% compared with 2019. By mid-December, Los Angeles saw a 30% increase over the previous year with 322 homicides. - Cheryl Corley, NPR correspondent
After collecting our data, we were able to organize it all by the different crime codes and graph it (figure 1). As we look at the histogram, we can see that burglary (successful and attempted) and assault (police, simple, partner and others) have the highest number of reported cases. The positively skewed histogram shows the median of crimes falls right on the code of 434 (Burglary). The data not only gave us the maximum number of cases but also gave us an insight on just how many crimes are taking place in Los Angeles. In the year 2020, there were an average of 510 cases of violence happening in Los Angeles, but the number can be higher because some cases weren't reported. We hope that this information we gathered brings light to some city safety concerns and to help with future cases, we have created a survey that can be filled out. The data submitted via the survey will allow for more accurate records which could benefit any future plans involving city safety.
Our research efforts hope to provide critical data to those who live in and around the Los Angeles area and also serve as a means by which we can learn more about our local neighborhoods. The research we’ve collected would inform the audience about neighborhood activities so that we can better devote police efforts and city funding for the critically impacted areas. Also, coordination with local city organizers and public safety commissions would improve making our communities a safer place to live in. Moreover, this data has the potential to serve as an example of how we can proactively monitor and assess these rates of crime in these areas and warn those in the community whom are affected the most by these violent crimes to bring awareness to the issue and promote the reporting of crime when it happens so that we may be able to compile live crime data statistics more readily and diagnose the issues which plague our neighborhoods.