!VAR HAGENDOORN

The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report

The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report contains a listing of all homicide victims reported by the Los Angeles County coroner. As it says on the site, any human being who dies at the hand of another in Los Angeles County, and whose death is recorded by the coroner, is included in the report.

It is an excellent example of web 2.0 reporting. The differences between traditional newspaper reporting and the Homicide Report are only slight. It would have been possible to cover the same news in print, but the fact is that it isn’t. Newspaper space is limited, so is air time on radio or tv. For this reason only newsworthy homicides receive press coverage, for example when a celebrity is involved, as in the Phil Spector case. Online there are no such limitations. The blog format also makes it possible to add updates, to browse monthly archives and to leave comments. The makers have also included a visual interface with some further statistics and a map.

Inevitably some cases are missed and therefore the report cannot be used for scientific purposes. Some people die several days or weeks after being injured. And sometimes it takes time to establish whether a death was a homicide.

The strength of the LA Times Homicide Report is its consistency. In the months since its inception January 2007 the reporters established the right style and format. The reports became longer and the reporters found the right tone, at once personal and objective, but never sensational. Right from the start the comments section has come to serve as an online condolence book.

The Homicide Report does two things. On the one hand it rescues from anonimity all those homicides, which would otherwise have gone unreported. Going by the comments from friends and relatives of the victims this is very much appreciated. On the other hand it may reinforce people’s prejudices about Los Angeles being dangerous and a battlefield of gang warfare.

When looking at the statistics it is good to be reminded that Los Angeles County covers about 4,000 square miles and that there are 10 million people estimated to be living in Los Angeles County, about 4 million of which live in the City of Los Angeles. 10 million, that’s roughly the population of countries such as Portugal, Belgium and Sweden and double the size of countries such as Ireland, Norway, New Zealand and Finland. This puts the numbers somewhat in perspective. Somewhat, because compared with Sweden or Ireland, the data from Los Angeles County are pretty high. The econometrician in me would like to have more data: of the number of assaults in LA, of the number of car crashes etc. so as to better interpret the homicide data.

The map shows that there are far more killings in South Central and Downtown LA than in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. I know the area around Exposition Park, which borders on or is part of South Central, depending on how you look at it, from my visits to the University of Southern California. I’m not that familiar with nearby Florence and Huntington Park but it’s not that there are bullets flying around your head.

There’s a scene (at 9:29 and at 5:48) in Bowling for Columbine in which Michael Moore walks through South Central Los Angeles with Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear and make precisely this point. The media are not making up the stories about drive by shootings, they’re choosing what they’re covering. To put the numbers even further in perspective they should be compared with statistics about the number of car accidents.

The reason that I visit the Homicide Report from time to time is the same as why I read various (online) newspapers: as a reality check.

With the LA Times Homicide Report it is as with the news about the riots that swept through Paris and other French cities in 2005. What was shocking was not that on a particular night 1,400 vehicles were burned, but that during a normal weekend (apparently) 40-60 vehicles are burned and that this goes unnoticed and unreported.