The real story to LA crime..

[dusesean1986]

This is the deal, most people who slam Los Angeles with a terrible Criminal record are usually the people who have left or want to leave. Yes, they might have lived in a semi-rough area, but there taking their anger and justifying all of Los Angeles as being criminalized and a city composed of mostly rough spots. The original poster is correct on his stats, but Los Angeles does have some extremely dangerous locations, like it has lots of perfectly fine locations. BTW, Santa Barbara is in Ventura County.

[fastfilm]

Here's an easy to follow link that shows Los Angeles homicides for one, average week recently, from March 26 - Apr. 1, 2007. For those unfamiliar with L.A., the Valley is north of the 101 freeway (where it says Burbank, not Griffith Park), less populated foothill/mtns. are in between the Valley and L.A., and the San Gabriel mtns. to the northeast of the map are less populated as well. Note the number of innocent victims of random violence.

http://www.lawatchdog.com/LAhomocideReport040407.html

[PROJECT PAT]

wow, gimme a break here, get ur facts straight, compton has the highest murder rate in the us and ur rele gna try n say that nebraska is more dangerous with its 5 murders a year? just about any city has a higher crime rate than nebraska or ames, i live in wat many consider a ghetto in the city of pittsburgh and **** that goes on round here aint pretty, ud have 2 live there 2 know wat i mean

[Charles]

One of the best true crime books I ever read and it's about the murder of the mother of a notable SoCal author. Great SoCal historical landscape.

Barnes*&*Noble.com - Books: My Dark Places, by James Ellroy, Paperback

[UB50]

Just for fun, look at the demographics for this California city (taken from City Data):

Hispanic (35.5%)
Chinese (33.1%)
Other race (16.3%)
White Non-Hispanic (13.8%)
Vietnamese (4.9%)
Other Asian (4.1%)
Two or more races (4.0%)
Filipino (2.0%)
Black (1.7%)
Japanese (1.6%)
American Indian (1.2%)
Korean (0.8%)
Asian Indian (0.6%)

A murder took place in this town. What race was the victim?

If you guessed White, you were right.

Now what race is the person who was arrested for this murder?














Well, it was Phil Spector and I think he's pretty much White too.

The city is Alhambra.

What I have found in LA is that the Anglo population automatically thinks that if an area has a large black, latino, or Asian population that it is a bad neighborhood. That makes almost every LA neighborhood a "bad neighbohood" even though statistics show otherwise.

You can't judge an area solely on the basis of race and you can't assume that living around white people is going to make you "safer."

[music7lover]

Originally Posted by majoun

you forgot Los Angeles Times: The Homicide Blog
Map Builder::From the LA Times Homicide Report Blog

This should give one an idea of what the safe and unsafe areas of LA County are. While there are a few murders listed in normally safe areas (generally related to domestic violence or in one case a hit by Russian organized crime which is NOT what people in LA think of as "gang violence"), notice where the clusters of murders are on the homicide map. Those are dangerous gang ridden areas....South L.A./South Central, East L.A., Van Nuys, SE L.A. County, etc.

I had no idea about all of the murders until I started reading the "Homicide Report" blog in the LA Times. I have been reading it for over a year and I am just horrified at the lack of reason that it can take to get killed in certain parts of LA. There are people that say that the US needs to forget about Iraq and deal with the problems in this country first. I couldn't agree more. All of the senseless murders in LA are atrocious.

[TheRealAngelion]

The truth about LA crime is that crime, more specifically murders, are down in the city. LA is not even in the top 100 most dangerous U.S. cities and the number of murders in 2007 are on track to be at their lowest level since 1970.

LA Daily News - City set to have fewer than 400 homicides this year

[LALady]

Originally Posted by music7lover

I had no idea about all of the murders until I started reading the "Homicide Report" blog in the LA Times. I have been reading it for over a year and I am just horrified at the lack of reason that it can take to get killed in certain parts of LA.

Homicide reports are often shocking, particularly reports about murders among young males - "they fought over a game of cards, one pulled a gun and shot the other". Senseless mindless crap.

[Charles]

Very neat crime map. Note how West Hills and Canoga Park have had significant increases in violent crime.

Crime L.A. - Mapping L.A. - Los Angeles Times