Central Area Weekly Update: July 11, 2009

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Each week Captain Blake Chow, Commanding Officer of LAPD's Central Division, sends out an email to the community. Captain Chow has agreed to let blogdowntown bring his emails to our readers.

As of July 11, 2009 Central reported the following crime numbers. All numbers are YTD unless otherwise noted. Part I crime dropped again this week.

• Violent Crime up 5 percent (or 31 crimes more than last year)
• Homicides are even
• Rapes are down 24 percent
• Robbery is up 3 percent (7 more than last year)
• Agg Assaults are up 11 percent (27 more than last year)

There were two parking lot robberies in the area of 7th to 9th, Hill and Flower. There was also one parking lot robbery in the area of Pico and Santee. In all cases it appears as though gang members robbed the parking lot attendant at knife point. They all occurred on July 8th between the hours of 12 noon and 3pm.

We will be email out a crime flier for your clients distribution in the next day.

Additionally, there were two bank robberies last Friday, most probably done by the same suspect. Both occurred in and around the 1st and San Pedro area. The suspect was described as a Male/Black, brown eyes, black hair, approximately 5-9, 200 pounds, 25-30 years old. He was wearing a striped green/grey shirt, blue jeans and riding an "older" blue mountain bike.

• Property Crime is down 9 percent
• Burglary is down 22 percent
• Grand Theft Auto is down 22 percent
• Burgl from Motor vehicle is down 5 percent Personal Theft is down 5 percent

Total Part I Crimes are down 5.4 percent for the division.

OTHER

In an effort to combat graffiti crime as many of you know we have implemented a graffiti abatement team. The goals of the team is to use intelligence gathering, identify chronic taggers, serve search warrants and apprehend taggers plaguing the downtown area. During the last four weeks they have made over five arrests. In a high publicity case/ arrest made of a chronic tagger in Chinatown, today we were informed that the DA was filing 13 additional counts on the juvenile based upon great documentation of prior incidents by the Chinatown BID.

Therefore, it is essential we work together to continue to gather intelligence on the chronic taggers as when apprehensions are made prior acts are taken into account.

Blake

Captain III Blake Chow
Commanding Officer
LAPD Central Area
213-972-1289