The Los Angeles Police Department is taking heat for not posting its crime statistics to its public website, making it almost impossible to track trends in the city.
The department pulled the crime information after it rolled out a new record-keeping system that it claims changes the way it counts theft, assaults, and other crimes, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Officials said that efforts are underway to get the stats back online but it’s been months without an update in a city that has a problematic past with public safety and law enforcement.
Police have the numbers and provide up-to-date tallies to city officials upon request, and interim Chief Dominic Choi provides a crime snapshot to the Police Commission every week, the Los Angeles Times reported. The problem is that the public doesn’t have easy access to it and they are left in the dark about what’s happening in their own city.
The LAPD used to release weekly crime reports with breakdowns on the number of offenses and arrests for all violent and property crime categories from the prior week and the year-to-date for the entire city. The LAPD added a disclaimer to the site’s page about the department’s shift to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which it hopes will bring the city’s reporting in line with federal guidelines that eventually will provide more detailed crime information.
NIBRS was implemented to improve the quality of crime data collected by law enforcement and includes information on each crime incident, as well as separate offenses within the same incident. The information includes details on victims, offenders, relationships between victims and offenders, arrestees, and property. For example, in the old system, a robbery-homicide would be registered as only a homicide. The FBI system logs both.
“We are hoping to have both the Open Data Portal and crime statistics both and running in the next few months,” Lt. Christopher Chase of the Compstat Division said in an email to the Los Angeles Times. “It is a Herculean task but lots of smart people are working on it!”
Criminologists have cautioned about the reliability of statistics reported by police agencies. They fear the numbers can be twisted for political purposes and manipulated. A nationwide campaign to provide more transparency was launched and places are slowly shifting into NIBRS.
The LAPD was among the last big-city agencies to make the switch to NIBRS.
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At the latest in-person briefing of LA’s crime stats, Choi said homicides were up 11% compared to the first half of 2023. He was unable to provide a single explanation but said there was “no trend of a gang feud or no trend of a particular race war.”
South Los Angeles had the highest number of homicides this year at 47, which is 14 more than over the same period in 2023. The city has also seen an 18% spike in robberies. Downtown Los Angeles saw the largest increase in commercial burglaries. The areas of Wilshire and Hollywood saw the most residential burglaries.