Mayor Karen Bass stood with two San Fernando Valley city councilmembers this week to declare Los Angeles safer than when she took office, pointing to a 47% drop in homicides and a 50% drop in shooting victims over the past four years. The announcement landed about a week before the election, and it came without her mayoral opponent, Nithya Raman, who represents part of the Valley but did not attend.
Bass Cites Steep Declines in Murders and Shootings
Bass said Los Angeles recorded 161 fewer homicides between October 2022 and October 2026, a 47% plunge, according to NBC Los Angeles. She also said the number of shooting victims fell 50% over the same span, with 573 fewer people shot. Those figures were central to her broader message, delivered about a week before the election, that the city has become measurably safer during her tenure, as reported by ABC7 Los Angeles.
The mayor pointed to new city crime figures that compared October data with the same period four years earlier. A separate independent analysis by ABC7 found overall crime down 9.6% in October 2026 compared with the same time in 2025, and homicides down about 13.8% over that one-year window — a different measurement than the four-year comparison Bass emphasized.
Valley Numbers and a Political Flashpoint
At the event, Bass highlighted reductions in San Fernando Valley crime specifically, saying Valley burglaries were down 41% compared with the previous year. The same report from the station's account put robberies down 21% and motor vehicle thefts down 31% in the Valley over the same period. A separate snippet from the mayor's own office cited a 43% drop in Valley burglaries since the previous August, a somewhat different figure than the 41% NBC Los Angeles attributed to Bass for the comparable period in 2025.
Bass also touted her directive to LAPD to crack down on burglaries along Ventura Boulevard in Encino, Tarzana and Woodland Hills, per the same NBC Los Angeles account. That directive touches directly on the district Raman represents, and her absence from the event did not go unnoticed. Rob Glushon, president of the Encino Property Owners Association, used the press conference to criticize Raman, saying she was “missing in action” during a widely publicized burglary spike in Encino.
Raman's Office Pushes Back
Raman's office disputed that characterization, saying she worked with LAPD's West Valley Division, the mayor's office and other city departments to establish an Encino crime-suppression strategy. Her office also said she wrote directly to Encino constituents with safety updates and resources during the spike. Raman, who is challenging Bass for mayor, did not attend the crime announcement.
LAPD Still Withholding Block-Level Crime Data
Even as the mayor leaned on citywide statistics, LAPD continues to face scrutiny over detailed neighborhood-level crime data it stopped releasing in 2025. The department changed how it reports crime on the city's open data portal that year so that it no longer includes location information down to the city block where incidents occurred, according to LAist. Some news organizations and research groups have said that block-level data is necessary to understand where crime is actually concentrated.
Crime-mapping service SpotCrime filed a public records request for the unpublished data in February 2025 and, after it went unanswered, filed a lawsuit against LAPD. SpotCrime has accused the department of wrongfully withholding the data and engaging in what it calls an unlawful pattern of delaying tactics, the outlet's reporting states. A RAND researcher cited in that same report, Roland Neil, noted that just 5% of city blocks or intersections — so-called micro places — can account for half of a city's crime, underscoring why granular location data matters to researchers and residents alike.
LAPD Assistant Chief Michael Rimkunas said this week that the department is working to make neighborhood crime map data available again and believes that data needs to be released. LAPD has said separately that its CrimeMapping platform is undergoing updates to integrate a new data feed. Still, as of a March report from LAist, the department had not set a date for when the detailed data would return, even as San Francisco's public crime website already offers location data down to the nearest street intersection from the previous day.
A Broader, Messier Data Picture
The mayor's office has attributed some of Los Angeles' recent crime declines to a nationwide trend of falling violent and property crime, rather than solely to local policy. Citywide LAPD figures reported through late October show year-to-date person crimes down 4.0% and property crimes down 11.8% compared with the same period in 2025, with burglary and breaking-and-entering offenses down 26.1% and combined person-and-property crimes down 10.1%.
Comparing those numbers across years carries some complexity. LAPD transitioned in May 2024 to a blended reporting method incorporating federal Summary Reporting System and National Incident-Based Reporting System standards, and the department has said its 2024 year-to-date totals could not be directly compared with 2023 and 2022 figures because of the change in methodology. LAPD reinstated regular public postings of its crime data effective August 28, 2024, after that transition was complete.
