Is Filming the LAPD Driving Up Crime in Los Angeles?

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Police Department gifted a mid-year snapshot of the local crime picture, and it wasn't a pretty one. The latest numbers show that crime in the city is up 12.7 percent through the first six months of 2015, with violent crime up just over 20 percent. The murder rate is actually down, which is nice, while property crime has seen a roughly 10 percent increase.

Since LA's crime rate had been in decline for more than a decade, everyone from the Mayor to LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to criminologists are trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on.

"You see police chiefs who immediately go to legislation and say that's the causation, that immediately go to the economy and say that's the causation," Beck said in a joint press conference with Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday. "It's a number of things."

The chief and mayor cited an uptick in gang violence, a surge in homelessness, and a new state law on drug possession as potential factors. But according to Jorja Leap, an anthropologist who heads up the Health and Social Justice Partnership at the University of California-Los Angeles, the nationwide trend toward taking out our cell phones and documenting police conduct early and often might be at play here, too. The idea is that all the scrutiny in the wake of unarmed black men being killed by cops—like the man shot on LA's Skid Row in March—might be discouraging LAPD officers from being too aggressive.

Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't film police.

"I think it's a necessary thing. We need to have accountability. But the trouble is, we're going to have a period of adjustments here," Leap told VICE.

Beck didn't mention the cameraphone factor, instead suggesting that Proposition 47—the state law voters approved back in November de-felonizing drug possession—"cannot be taken out of the equation." Getting caught with most drugs doesn't result in jail time in California anymore, which theoretically means more criminals are on the street. But the chief stopped short of directly blaming the new law, and conceded that the uptick began late last year, LA Weekly reported.

Gang crime is up 18 percent, according to the new data, with Beck predicting gang-related homicides will top out at around 130 this year. The chief also mentioned homelessness—which has gone up 12 percent in LA County over the past two years, according to a report by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority—as a culprit. Beck has said homelessness "drives almost all the crime" around LAPD headquarters.

But according to Dr. Leap, "The homeless will definitely contribute to property crime," such as petty theft, but "you cannot attribute the rise in violent crime to the homeless. Absolutely not. What I see the homeless arrested for in the greatest number is public urination, camping on beaches, camping in public parks. Homeless folks do not walk around with firearms or deadly weapons."

Leap does agree with the chief that gangs are at play, but thinks the videos are the thing.

"The minute someone knows they're being observed, they are going to act differently," she said. "There are police officers that understandably might weigh the impact of their actions, and they have to balance containing crime versus community response."

This is not an entirely new idea, according to Jeffery Fagan, a policing and criminal justice expert at Columbia Law School. "At this point, the whole idea of a 'chilling effect' from videos has been internalized in police culture, and spread like a cultural meme across the country," he told VICE in an email.

For instance, when Baltimore residents experienced their own recent surge in crime after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained in police custody, Deputy State's Attorney Page Croyder went on Fox News to tell Sean Hannity, "If you were to lock [police] up and charge them criminally, they really couldn't do their jobs. They would be like, I'm not going to make an arrest, if I'm wrong I could go to jail. So that's a very chilling effect."

According to Fagan, after Croyder took to the talk show circuit to spread this idea, "several police union leaders picked up her theme and megaphoned it in their cities and regions thru the media." [sic]

As the Dallas Morning News reported, other major cities like Dallas are seeing their own violent crime surges, while fluctuations in New York City and Philadelphia have been less dramatic.

Another plausible factor in LA's case is that residents are simply being more diligent about reporting crimes. This came up in January, when officials noticed an alarming rise in reports of rape last year. At the time, Beck chalked it up to an increase in "acquaintance rapes" actually being reported to authorities, and vaguely implied that it was a good thing.

"We need to send a better message to our young people," he said. "The ways to keep yourself safe—the need to report, the need to work within your school, the need to contact the police—these are the things that will affect this crime category."

But now it seems like the uptick in rapes reported—this year rapes are up about 8 percent so far—is just part of a larger problem in LA. There have already been 739 documented rapes in Los Angeles in 2015, compared to 685 at this point in 2014 and 590 the year before that, according to LAPD stats. (As the LAPD report noted,
"Rape Stats from previous years were updated to include additional Crime Class Codes that have been added to the UCR [Uniform Crime Report] Guidelines for the crime of Rape.")

For her part, UCLA's Dr. Leap thinks police must do their jobs well and be subject to greater scrutiny. In essence, the public should have its cake and eat it, too.

"One thing we've got to remember: accountability doesn't happen overnight," Leap said. "This adjustment is going to take time, and it must be organic. There's going to be fallout. This may be part of a transition to greater accountability."

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