Los Angeles’ crime map has always been the sort of neighborhood safari journalists and armchair detectives click on when they want to know whether their block is trending toward bliss or bedlam.
Lately, though, the map has gone mysteriously dark — and the Los Angeles Police Department says it’s not a glitch, it’s a feature.
The LAPD has refused to release the raw COMPSTAT data and detailed crime-map records requested by LAist, arguing that preliminary numbers could “lead to misguided public policy discussions or unjustified public panic.”
To the department, this is a bureaucratic version of “handle with care.”
LAPD officials point to the department’s ongoing migration onto the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) — a big, federal-grade spreadsheet brain transplant that began in March 2024 — and say the switch has produced messy, preliminary datasets that the public might misread.
The city’s public-facing crime feeds disappeared for months during the transition, and the department says some underlying arrest records were “currently unavailable due to structural errors and duplicate entries” as of August 2025.
Meanwhile, weekly COMPSTAT briefings continue to be given to the Police Commission and city officials — just not the underlying raw files the public and reporters asked for.
If you’re twitching at the thought of police data being withheld, you’re in good company.
First Amendment lawyers, transparency advocates, and a half-dozen skeptical data nerds argue that public agencies aren’t allowed to hide information merely because it’s inconvenient or might be misinterpreted.
Under the California Public Records Act, an agency can’t simply invoke a catchall exemption to avoid embarrassing scrutiny; the law generally favors disclosure so the public can form its own judgments and hold officials accountable.
LAist says it made a formal records request in May and was denied on Oct. 30, 2025 — which is exactly the sort of administrative gatekeeping that makes watchdogs sigh.
From the LAPD’s vantage point, there’s a not-entirely-illegitimate worry here: crime data is complicated.
NIBRS counts multiple offenses per incident, which can make totals look higher even when the underlying safety picture hasn’t materially changed.
Presenting raw, incident-level feeds without careful explanation could, in theory, spark overreactions in neighborhoods, policy panics in City Hall, or misleading headlines on the early-morning news crawl.
The rub is that “we’ll explain it for you later” doesn’t help a reporter trying to independently verify an official claim today — and elected officials often prefer the convenience of a narrative they can quote without the messy context.
The opacity has practical consequences.
When public data vanishes, independent researchers can’t reproduce statistics; journalists can’t verify police statements about trends in shootings, burglaries, or arrests; and community groups can’t examine whether enforcement is fair across neighborhoods.
That vacuum invites rumor, distrust, and — ironically — the “public panic” the department claims it wants to avoid.
Transparency advocates argue that the correct remedy for confusing data is more context, not less access: publish the files with clear caveats, offer metadata and methodology notes, and let civic technologists help turn messy files into usable charts.
There’s also a politics-of-visibility problem.
The shift to NIBRS is a federal standardization exercise — meant to produce richer, more granular crime data — but it also exposes local agencies to awkward comparisons and new reporting headaches.
If a city’s numbers temporarily wobble during a technical migration, the temptation to button up the spreadsheet and wait for a PR-friendly narrative is understandable.
The democratic problem is that those decisions are being made behind closed doors while the public is told the data is too volatile for public eyes.
So what now?
LAist and other advocates are pressing the department and, if necessary, the courts.
If the public can’t get the data, legal challenges and public pressure are the next available tools.
In the meantime, the City will keep getting weekly slides and verbal briefings while civic technologists and reporters tap their keyboards trying to reconstruct what the LAPD is choosing not to publish.
Satirical takeaway: if data were a pastry, the LAPD is telling us to trust the baker because the filling is delicate — while locking the bakery and keeping the recipe in a safe.
The sensible alternative is obvious and boring: show the recipe, explain why you added more sugar this week, and let people decide whether they want a slice.
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