An LAPD squad car parked outside the Our Savior Parish, a block away from the University of Southern California campus.
An LAPD squad car parked outside the Our Savior Parish, a block away from the University of Southern California campus.
State law requires the Los Angeles Police Department to record the data of police stops which is then made public. Data of reported crimes and 911 calls are also publicly available.
An analysis of these datasets not only gives us an idea of criminal activity in Los Angeles' various neighborhoods and communities but also police activity in those areas.
The interactive dashboard below shows the statistics for police activity from 2010 to 2018 throughout the city and compares that to the city's demographics and the number of reported crimes.
You can also choose to view police activity in your area. If your community is served by more than one station, you will be given a further option to choose.
Select your community:
The interactive map below gives a more visual representation of police stops and reported crimes broken down by reporting districts — the smallest geographic unit used by the LAPD that is publicly made available.
Hover/click on the map for details. Click on the buttons to change views.
Hover/click on the map for details. Click on the buttons to change views.
Every Tuesday morning activists from various groups and coalitions attend the weekly Los Angeles Police Commission meetings. Concerns raised at these meetings range from excessive force and officer-involved shootings to racial profiling and over-policing of minority communities and less affluent neighborhoods.
The starting premise for building this database was simple: an analysis of the data on vehicle and pedestrian stops conducted by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in conjunction with data of reported crimes, 911 calls, and area demographics would, at the very least, provide an indication of whether some of the accusations are true.
Citywide, motorists and pedestrians identified as black were stopped by officers at a rate three times the community’s share of the city’s population. Some divisions like Van Nuys also recorded stops disproportionate number of stops of people identified as “other.” It would be interesting to look into how officers of those stations determine the ethnicity or race of the person they stop.
The LAPD makes data on the stops its officers carry out publicly available on the city’s open data portal. Data of reported crimes and 911 service requests are also made public. For demographic data, I used datasets from the 2017 American Community Survey by the United States Census Bureau.
My primary analysis of the data on police stops focused on each of the 21 geographic area divisions. I also sorted the data between motorist and pedestrian stops. This was done because the dataset is not detailed enough to distinguish between a regular traffic stop and one that may lead to a search, detainment or even an arrest. Moreover since a common complaint was that officers were racially profiling, it made sense to focus on the pedestrian stops separately: if a person is walking or standing out in the open, an officer is very likely to already have an idea of what they are doing, what age they are and their race.
Since the analysis focused on day-to-day policing in communities, I left out stops made by officers from support units or specialized divisions like the elite Metropolitan division which has jurisdiction over the whole city. I also left out stops carried out by officers with the LAPD’s traffic bureaus because their primary task is to cite people for traffic violations.
While analyzing the data of reported crimes, I focused on property and violent crimes reported in each division. Keeping in mind the definitions in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program, the reports accounted for in this database include homicides, sex crimes, robberies, burglaries, thefts, assaults, crimes involving gangs or narcotics, fraud and arson. A similar analysis was done for 911 calls — calls regarding quality-of-life issues like “party” were excluded because these factors do not influence police deployment or policing methods.
The data of police stops also contains an officer serial number which the dictionary defines as “the unique employee identifier assigned to each sworn officer with LAPD.” After analyzing data of each division, the next logical step was to focus on individual officers. The dataset contains 8815 unique serial numbers. After carefully sorting the data so that I had a new dataset containing each of the serial numbers and the number of times a person belonging to each racial/ethnic group was stopped by the officer with that number, I attempted to join it with a dataset containing the employee details of all LAPD officers from 2010 to 2018. This was when I encountered my first major roadblock.
Of the 8815 serial numbers, only around 500 matched with those from LAPD’s list of employees. Several phone calls to the department’s discovery section and two more public records requests later, I was informed that the serial numbers in the dataset are “masked” — state law prevents all unique officer identifiers from being released to the public.
Since the dataset contained only around eight thousand serial numbers for the seven million people who were stopped i.e. each entry in the dataset did not generate unique serial numbers, it was clear that each number had some internal meaning which could be understood by the LAPD.
Serial number 44652 had 2381 pedestrian stops assigned to it, 84% of whom were identified as black. Was it the same officer who made all those stops? Did the officer stop all those black individuals simply because they had always worked in areas which were predominantly black? Does the data indicate an instance of racial profiling? These are questions that will remain unanswered as long as the law remains the way it is.
A second minor roadblock was the calculation of neighborhood demographics. Police boundaries almost never match with neighborhood boundaries. Moreover, the publicly available data from the city of Los Angeles calculates demographics by neighborhood councils.
To calculate the demographics of the areas under each division, I primarily relied on zip codes that match with the communities listed on the LAPD website and obtained data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey.
The Los Angeles Police Department divides the city into four bureaus which are further sub-divided into 21 area divisions. Since police boundaries do not match with boundaries of neighborhoods or zip codes, the demographic data is merely an estimate.
The data of police stops does not reveal why an officer stopped a motorist or pedestrian. Neither does it state whether that person was searched, given a citation, detained or arrested after the stop. It also does not prove that members of certain communities are profiled by the police.
From 2018, the LAPD introduced a new racial/ethnic identifying category to their database on stops: “Multi-racial.” However, to maintain uniformity in my analysis of stops from nine years, I chose to exclude those records.
While it is true that most of the stops were conducted in South Los Angeles, an area which has a higher percent of black and Latino residents, the region also records high rates of violent and property crimes.
The Racial and Identity Profiling Act mandates the collection of more detailed data on police stops. The data is supposed to be released to the public sometime this year.