Central Area Weekly Update: December 26, 2009
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Commander Blake Chow is now Assistant Commanding Officer for Operations-Central Bureau, but he's still sending out his weekly Central Division email until Captain Chamberlain takes over in the new year.
As of Dec 26, 2009 Central reported the following crime numbers. All numbers are YTD unless otherwise noted.
- Violent Crime down 14 percent.
- Homicides are down 17 percent;
- Rapes are down 21 percent;
- Robbery is down 10 percent
Agg Assaults down 18 percent.
Property Crime is down 9 percent
- Burglary is down 22 percent
- Grand Theft Auto is down 26 percent
- Burgl from Motor vehicle is down percent
- Personal Theft is down 5 percent
Total Part I Crimes are down 10.3 percent for the division. Another drop from last week's YTD figures.
Total Part I Crime Figures are also DOWN from 2007 levels by 4.8 percent.
Violent Crime levels are down from 2007 levels by 13 percent.
This year Central will finish the year as reporting the lowest amount of total crime for the City. As of December 26, Central reported about 500 less crimes than the next lowest Division- Hollenbeck.
Have a safe New Years.
Blake
Mark on December 28, 2009, at 10:54AM – #1
Are reporting districts equalized for population (and would that be for daytime population or nighttime?) or other factors? Is it apples-to-apples to say "Central had fewer reported crimes than Hollenbeck, therefore Central is safer?" In fact, given what he wrote in this report that Central had the lowest reporting numbers in the city, does that actually mean that a downtownie has a lower chance of being a crime victim [for one of the listed crimes] than someone in tony parts of the Westside?
Eric Richardson (@blogdowntown) on December 28, 2009, at 11:04AM – #2
Mark: Populations between districts are going to vary greatly, so no, it isn't an apples to apples comparison.
You start to get at how complicated that normalization would be. Downtown's residential population is 30,000 - 40,000, but on any given weekday there are probably 400,000 people here.
We had a great discussion on Downtown safety back in September. I think it spoke well to the good and bad of the neighborhood.
Commander Blake Chow on December 28, 2009, at 07:16PM – #3
Mark
The discussion about what crime rates mean can take many turns. Bottom line is that in the downtown LA area, the day population can be upwards of 400,00 to 500,000 people. Additionally, the night time population is also significant given the changes downtown has seen. I've seen numbers representing the total number of downtown residents anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 but this number is only a fraction of the total number of people that use downtown to work, play, visit, etc.
What is significant is that given the changing face of downtown LA, the crime rate has been dropping for several years- even though thousands of people are drawn to this area that did not come down here 5-10 years ago.
My point is, that despite having a day and night population that is larger than some of the neighboring divisions, crime is low.