Los Angeles, the beautiful sprawling South California city that has long been the center of the nation’s film and television industry and home to the happiest place on earth, Disneyland. Unfortunately, for many of those looking to live in Los Angeles, the City of Angels also has its share of demons… Based on the most recently released FBI UCR statistics, Los Angeles experienced 32.6 crimes per 1,000 population, only 1% less than in 2017. While this might put a slight damper on your plans to move, it’s worth acknowledging that for a city of its size, Los Angeles is actually still doing quite well in terms of overall public safety.
To better understand the criminal activity in Los Angeles, we at RentHop looked into the crime data provided by the Los Angeles Police Department, and here are our key findings:
- Los Angeles saw fewer crimes in the past year.
1% fewer than in 2017. - In general, the most common type of reported violent crimes is assault. Since 2017, reported assaults have dropped a total of 0.9% with only 25,312 cases reported in 2018.
- Larceny was the most common type of reported property crime in 2018. There was a 6.9% increase in reported larceny crimes since 2017.
- Unfortunately, violent crimes have risen significantly in neighborhoods like Hermon, which experienced a 120% increase.
- Property crimes have also risen, albeit less dramatically, in neighborhoods like West Los Angeles, which saw a 23% increase.
Crimes in Los Angeles – Where Does Your Neighborhood Stand?
The interactive map below shows the number of crimes reported by neighborhoods. The darker the shade, the higher the crime rate. Note that, in order to rank impartially, we normalized the crime data by the population count in each neighborhood. Why did we do that? Hypothetically, neighborhoods with denser populations might see more criminal activities and normalization allows us to fairly compare the number of crimes from different neighborhoods.
We can tell from the shades that, generally, Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding areas have a higher concentration of crimes per 1,000 population, but there’s no significant correlation between crime rates and proximity to city center cross the entire Los Angeles City. In addition to Downtown Los Angeles, Central Hollywood also experienced more crimes compared to other neighborhoods from 2016 to 2018, with a normalized crime rate of 135 per 1,000 population. Click on the neighborhoods to learn more, and you can reset the map by clicking on the ‘reset’ button in the upper left corner.
The City of Angels or the City of Demons?
It is well established that the volumn of crime is related to the size of a city’s population. Home to over 3.9 million people, the City of Angeles inevitably sees a large volum of crimes on a daily basis. In 2018, LAPD logged in total 222,012 crime incidents, 1% less than in the previous year. However, that does not mean that crimes are going down in every corner of the city. For certain neighborhoods, things actually got worse.
Violent Crime Volume Went Up in These Neighborhoods in 2018
- Hermon – 10 violent crimes in 2017, 22 in 2018, +120%
- Westside- 250 violent crimes in 2017, 353 in 2018, +41%
- Foothill Trails District – 243 violent crimes in 2017, 301 in 2018, +24%
- Hollywood United – 307 violent crimes in 2017, 365 in 2018, +19%
- Studio City – 340 violent crimes in 2017, 395 in 2018, +16%
Property Crime Volume Went Up in These Neighborhoods in 2018
- West Los Angeles – 981 property crimes in 2017, 1,206 in 2018, +23%
- Historic Cultural- 1,281 property crimes in 2017, 1,566 in 2018, +22%
- Glassell Park – 401 property crimes in 2017, 478 in 2018, +19%
- West Adams – 859 property crimes in 2017, 982 in 2018, +14%
- Studio City – 1,206 property crimes in 2017, 1,369 in 2018, +14%
When breaking down the crime indicients by types of crime, we noticed that incidents involving rape and homicides have been dropping since 2016. The number of batteries, on the contrary, has been increasing. As for property crimes, the crime volume has been going up in the past three years, from 96,835 in 2016 to close to 100,000 in 2018. Of the five types of property crimes, larcenies had a big jump, from 33,825 in 2017 to 36,114 in 2018. The graphs below further summarizes our findings.
Note that the information presented in this dataset does not represent statistics submitted to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR). Therefore, any comparison of crime volume is strictly prohibited.
What You Need to Know to Stay Safe
In addition to geographical location, we also broke down reported crimes by day of the week, month, and time of the day. Below is an infographic for easy-sharing, which summarizes our findings.
Methodology
To better understand crimes in Los Angeles, we pulled the crime incident data made public by the Los Angeles Police Department. This dataset includes all crime incidents since 2010, and we limited the scope to 2016 to 2018. Violent crimes mainly include assault, battery, homicide, robbery, rape, and kidnapping. Property crimes mainly include arson, burglary, larceny, theft from vehicle, and vehicle theft. We first removed possible duplicates based on time, date, crime codes, and location, and then geocoded each reported crime to corresponding neighborhoods using the coordinates provided by the open data portal. The neighborhood council population count and boundaries were retrieved from the Demographics of Neighborhood Councils dataset provided by the LA Geohub.
