Hancock Park was recently named the worst neighborhood in Los Angeles for residential burglaries by the websote Crosstown, which tracks area crime and traffic, based on statistics from the Los Angeles Police Department, and is published by data scientists and journalists from the the USC Annenberg School for Communications andJournalism. According to the recent post:
“The most dangerous neighborhood in Los Angeles for burglaries is actually one of the priciest enclaves in town, where the median home value is $3.3 million. Hancock Park, home to actors such as Mindy Kaling, George Takei, and once upon a time the likes of Clark Gable and Mae West, had more burglaries per capita than any other area in the city in the first half of 2018.
According to Los Angeles Police Department data, between January and June, Hancock Park registered 61 burglaries, up from 55 during the same period a year earlier. The neighborhood has a population of around 10,000. That translates roughly to a burglary rate of 570. (The rate is calculated by dividing the number of reports by the population, then multiplying by 100,000.)” reported Crosstown.
It is worth noting, however, that the boundaries used for this claim are those identified by the Los Angeles Times, and do not line up exactly with those used by the City of Los Angeles, or by the neighborhood itself since its founding in the early 20th century. The neighborhood boundaries used by those entities are a bit smaller, including the blocks from Melrose to Wilshire, and Arden to Highland. (The LA Times map goes another half mile west, to La Brea.)
“The LA Times boundaries are wrong for Hancock Park,” said Cindy Chvatal-Keene, President of the Hancock Park Homeowners Association Est. 1948. “The neighborhood stops at Highland;, we don’t go all the way to La Brea. We’ve tried to get the Times to change that,” she added.
Using the correct boundaries would take a few reported burglaries between Highland and La Brea out of the equation for Hancock Park, but Chvatal-Keene said she agrees there’s too much crime in the neighborhood, and the Association works hard to educate people about how to prevent becoming a crime victim.
“Burglary is a problem, but it’s preventable,” said Peter Gorelick, a board member of the HPHOA and the chair of its security committee, in the Crosstown Crimes post. “It’s usually the result of something someone didn’t do, like turn on an alarm.”
While Hancock Park won the top spot, nearby Windsor Square came in at number three on the Crosstown Crimes list, with a burglary rate of 520 (compared to Hancock Park’s 570) per 10,000 residents. (But the boundaries for Windsor Square, as delineated by the Times and Crosstown Crimes, are also slightly out of alignment with the neighborhood’s own long-established borders, which stop at Ridgwood Dr. north of Second Street, not Wilton Place, as the Times shows.) The Fairfax area just missed the top five with a burglary rate of 440 per 10,000 residents.
