Crime On the Rise?

Los Angeles, California 2010–2015

The following map is a dot density plot of all of the criminal arrests that occurred in Los Angeles between 2010 and 2015.

The Data

Data for this article was transcribed from paper criminal reports and provided by the City of Los Angeles and can be located here. The entire notebook, including code and comments, can be found here.

Taking a deeper dive, we can analyze how the data changed over time using a line graph:

The figure above illustrates an initial decrease in the total number of criminal arrests in Los Angeles by more than 8,000 in 2013, followed by a slight recovery and steady increase in the coming years.

Top 20 Crime Categories & Weapons Used:

According to the data, the most frequent crime categories and weapons used are listed above. The bar graphs indicate that the most commonly committed crime was Battery with more than 95,000 cases occurring between 2010 and 2015. Also, the most frequently used weapon was “strong-arm”.

Victim Demographics:

Analyzing the histogram above, there doesn’t seem to be a significant difference between the two distributions. Overall, men were more often the victim of a crime with a total count of 488,866, whereas women had a total count of 443,184.