Our Safety Tracker gathers crime and safety information across SoCal. But some agencies have more up-to-date data than others.
There's a consensus among experts when it comes to crime data: it's important.
"American people deserve nothing less" than "reliable data and evidence to inform crime policy decision making," said Alex Piquero, the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"If we improve the data systems, we improve the information that then people use to make the kinds of decisions that they need," he said.
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There are multiple ways law enforcement agencies publish this type of data. Most departments release static reports online, usually in the form of PDFs. They often look at broad crime categories and summarize year-to-year changes.
But these reports often lag months or years after the crimes occur and may not provide a lot of flexibility to explore the data.
The Los Angeles Police Department is one of a handful of departments in Southern California that regularly publishes data to the city's open data portal on every crime that the department records. It allows users to "drill down" to more granular categories, LAPD Deputy Chief Kris Pitcher said.
"That's the department's commitment toward transparency; we want to make sure that everything that is recorded. All of the crimes, all of the issues, everything else is uploaded on a weekly basis so that the public gets an opportunity to see exactly what is going on within a community," Pitcher said.
The data includes information on victims, weapons and locations for each crime.
The city of Los Angeles page of ABC7's Neighborhood Safety Tracker is built using data from the data published by LAPD.
Of course, crime data is never perfect - even a disclaimer on the portal itself acknowledges there may be some inaccuracies, and there are a few safeguards in place to maintain privacy.
Pitcher said the department will go back years to update specific cases as they learn more, and the department has several checks in place by officers and detectives to ensure the data is as accurate as possible.
Piquero from the BJS said these types of open data portals, "help create the transparency that the people need and that people deserve."
According to Pitcher, many local agencies and governments simply don't have the technology or resources to publish data this way.
"The larger agencies tend to have the technology that supports the ability to at least gather that data and ultimately post it," he said.
This technology can be expensive.
"Who's going to pay for the storage in the cloud? Who's going to input the data? Who's going to check the data?" Piquero said.
"There's vendors that you have to buy this stuff from, and you have to upkeep it. And so these things are expensive, but they're necessary," Piquero continued.
And LAPD is only one agency, covering only the city of Los Angeles.
The rest of Los Angeles County consists of independent cities and unincorporated areas.
Some of the cities have their own police departments and others rely on the L.A. County Sheriff's Department for law enforcement services.
The unincorporated areas are also patrolled by the sheriff's department.
A drive on the 10 Freeway from Pomona to Santa Monica would take you through about 10 different law enforcement jurisdictions, including in and out of LAPD and sheriff's boundaries.