Is Los Angeles a Safe City?. An high-level exploration of Los…
By: Harrison Chaw
Tags: Los Angeles, Data Visualization, Journalism, Data Science, Data Journalism

Los Angeles has been depicted as a seedy crime ridden city through representations in the media and movies. But what was once an assumption and stereotype of the safety of the city, we have only been able to assume the amount of within LA. However, under Eric Garcetti’s Administration as mayor, we have been lucky to have access to city level data under his Data LA initiative. We are now able to have a deeper insight as to what crimes are committed within the city. In this analysis, I will be looking simple one dimensional analysis of the dataset.

It should be noted that this analysis only accounts for reported crimes and is limited to the city of Los Angeles and not the greater Los Angeles area. For those more tech oriented readers, feel free to check out my GitHub for the coding used to analyze the data.

Overview of the Data

The data consists of all reported crimes from January 1, 2010, to the date I have pulled the data (October 20,2019). We have roughly 2,066,574 rows of data and 28 columns. In regards to the contents of the data we have data on the following aspects regarding the crime: dates & time, the crime itself, weapons (if any), victims (if any), and the location of the crime.

Top 10 Analysis of Categories

Its somewhat shocking to see that the top ten crimes within LA are focused around fights, theft, and vandalism. With battery/simple assault counting as the number one reported crime, more people should pick up self defence classes (or practice sprinting). In addition, people should be more wary of their cars, given car-theft and burglaries from cars top out the top 3 categories.

Within the top 5 locations with the most crime, 4 of those are located within the “South Los Angeles” region. If you live in Los Angeles, you would know that there's areas don’t have a lot of economic development, so I would look further into these regions assess the impacts of wealth and these regions.

Not surprising that most crimes occurs on a streets as that car-related crimes account for the top 2 and 3 spots of reported crimes. But it is notable to say that the next two categories are within the confines of a living space, rather than say a public setting.

Of those crimes committed with a weapon, we can see that a vast majority of those crimes are committed with fists (or kicks) over having a physical weapon. Compared to all other weapons within the top 10, it is a fair assumption to most crimes committed within Los Angeles will not have a fire-arm present.

Time

Most crimes occur in the evening, with a heavier build up between the hours of 5:00PM to 8:00PM. There is a noticeable spike right at Noon, it can’t be certain that there is a sudden increase of crime during lunch hours or if its a default value used by the system.

Has Los Angeles become a safer city over time? Based on this data we can say it was, up until 2014 where it suddenly spiked up. I would disregard the dip in reported crime in 2019 as that it is still only October when this dataset was pulled and I suspect more reports will come trickling in that had occurred through the year.

Within the data, we have 2 columns indicating the date of the occurrence and the date of the report, I have found that the average time that it takes people to report the crime is roughly 18 days. The longest it took a person to report a crime was 3570 days (or roughly 9 years and 8 months)

Victims

Demographic data from Wikipedia

Los Angeles is an incredibly diverse city, and that is unfortunately well reflected in the data of who has been a victim of a crime. The demographics of victims follow closely to Los Angeles’s demographics, with the only notable call out that despite the heavier white population, the hispanic population were significantly more likely to be a victim of a crimes than did their white neighbors.

In my next post, I will look into to a more multi-factoral analysis (ie what type of crime is most prevalent in what areas, are a specific race being more targeted with specific crimes,etc).