"They Are Hiding The Truth About Crime In Los Angeles" by Daniel Guss
If you are reading this, you know me. You know what I report about and you know my style of reporting. When I am sure of the facts, I tell it like it is and I don’t pull any punches.
But I’m investigating a news story that is so important that I feel I need to let you know about it before I finish my investigation.
I’m still peeling this story, but this is what I know so far.
I know that the LAPD has been hiding the truth about crime in Los Angeles. They are afraid we will “panic” if we learn the truth. They don’t want LA City Council to know the truth because they are worried that the councilmembers will respond to the true crime rate with “misguided public policy discussions.”
I’m not kidding.
I’m not exaggerating.
I’m not making any of this up.
The Mayor, the City Attorney and the Police Chief are afraid we will panic if we learn the truth about crime in Los Angeles. They said so themselves.
I’ll get to that, but first, a little background.
This weekend, the Los Angeles Times published a story by reporter Libor Jany titled, “L.A. is safer than it’s been in decades, but crime is an issue dominating the mayor’s race.”
This headline implies that because of LA Mayor Karen Bass, our communities are safe and, therefore, her opponents should shut up. While internet bots picked up the claim without assessing its veracity, an AI assessment of the story’s comments revealed that roughly 80% of actual readers weren’t buying it. The comments section was a wall of hostile reality.
The public’s enormous concern over LA crime is entirely rational. Everybody who actually lives in Los Angeles knows that LA isn’t safer.
But it is worse than that.
The City’s claims that our neighborhoods are safer — repeated without question by the LA Times — cannot be confirmed because there is currently no way to verify whether we are actually safer, as Jany declared!
Years ago, the LAPD — undoubtedly with Bass’s blessing — stopped allowing the public to access and examine public information needed to determine the crime rates in specific, local neighborhoods.
While there is more to come on this story beyond the June 2nd primary, here is the baseline reality of the scheme.
In the past, police departments everywhere provided open public access to crime data, showing exactly what types of crimes were committed in hyper-local communities. Various internet services evolved to gather this data. However, different computer programs and processes often resulted in inconsistent and insufficient output.
To fix this, the federal government created the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), governed by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. Instead of keeping a basic, easily manipulated tally, NIBRS collects detailed data on every single criminal incident.
In 2016, the FBI gave law enforcement agencies a strict 2021 deadline to comply. The federal government heavily subsidized the transition from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) The vast majority of American law enforcement agencies met the deadline.
But not the LAPD.
Under LAPD’s SRS “hierarchy” system, the LAPD only counted the single most serious offense in each multi-crime incident. For example, if a criminal committed an armed robbery and a murder in the same incident, the LAPD only counted it as a single crime.
The NIBRS system prohibits that practice.
But as the FBI’s 2021 deadline closed-in, the LAPD built a wall around its crime data. They reported crime stats less frequently, with less detail and entirely eliminated critical “block-level” address reporting that allows citizens to see what is happening on their own streets.
As Bass’s dubious crime-reduction claims became increasingly detached from reality, LA-centric news outlet LAist asked the LAPD for the precise data.
The request was flatly denied.
The LA City Attorney, speaking on behalf of the LAPD, claimed that the greater precision required by the FBI “has the potential to lead to misguided public policy discussions or unjustified public panic.”
Read that again.
They think we, the people, are too frail, and the City Council too stupid, to deserve to know the truth.
That is not only illegal, it is deeply offensive.
Our own government thinks we are too weak to handle the truth. For an administration that continually whines about “saving democracy,” this is a textbook authoritarian bait-and-switch.
They are violating the core tenets of accountability that are the foundation of any functioning democracy. As the preamble to California’s Ralph M. Brown Act explicitly states:
“The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
This is magnificent, powerful language.
It clearly defines who works for whom. Something our Mayor, our City Attorney, and the LAPD have clearly forgotten.
We created the City of Los Angeles. We elect its officials. We created the Los Angeles Police Department. They do not have the right to decide what we can and cannot know about how they operate. They cannot hide the truth to protect themselves from accountability.
City Hall does not have the right to decide that Angelenos are too fragile to learn the truth about crime on their blocks. It doesn’t have the right to keep the truth from our blind-eye-turning elected officials just to manufacture a false narrative of safety.
The LA Times is laundering crime data that nobody can verify!
Local governments across America seamlessly provide truthful, transparent and comprehensive crime stats to their communities every single day. It hasn’t triggered “panic” or “misguided policies” anywhere else. The only real panic belongs to the politicians who know what will happen when the real numbers finally come to light.
So if you encounter our current candidates for Mayor, City Attorney, City Council, or Controller on the campaign trail, demand answers. Demand that they compel the LAPD to immediately release the block-level crime data they have illegally withheld from us.
It is both ludicrous and dangerous for the Times to claim that violent crime is down to “near-historic lows” when the public records backing that claim are locked in a vault.
The stats have been condensed.
The narrative is artificial.
And the clock is ticking.
As I said, I’ve only just begun looking into this.
Stay tuned for more.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards in June ‘23. In June ‘24, he won its “Best Commentary, Non-Political” award. He has contributed to the Daily Mail, CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)