Inglewood

Back when I was growing up, Inglewood was associated with two things, the Great Western Forum where Magic and Lakers were in their heyday, and gang violence. So what is it known for today? Unfortunately, for the exact same things. (Not that I have anything against the Lakers, regardless of what I may think of Kobi).

Now Inglewood is a very crowded place. More than 100,000 people live here. It really is a city onto itself. So that needs to be kept in perspective when I tell you how many people have been murdered there in the last four years. 92. That’s right, that not a typo. 92 people have met their makers through violence in the last four years. Even if you just consider this in terms of the yearly average—23 murders per year, this is pretty high. That is basically one out of every 5000 residents roughly. If you were told you had a one in five thousand chance of being killed each year that you lived somewhere, you might not want to live there I think.

How does this compare to other places in LA? Let’s take Glendale with roughly twice the population of Inglewood. How many murders have they had in the same period? 10. Not 10 per year, ten total. So you are 18 times more likely to die in a violent way in Inglewood than in Glendale. But perhaps this isn’t fair, Glendale after all is known as one of the safest areas in all of LA. In all categories of crime, compared to the overall LA average and national average Inglewood comes out on top in every category for the entire previous decade (the only exception being rapes where Inglewood came out below the average twice).

Put simply, when you go to the Lakers game, just get back in your car and get out of town, because this is just short of a war zone. (I realize I am slightly exaggerating the threat. I know that most of this violence is contained to rival gangs, but people do get caught in the crossfire and armed burglaries are common as well.)

I should say that some of the residents that I’ve met say it isn’t any worse than anywhere else (though I think the statistics speak for themselves). There is also a general feeling that with their newly elected mayor things will begin to improve again. I hope so, but frankly, until the issue of crime is addressed I don’t think there is much point in talking about the positives of the neighborhood.