In the first six months of 2026, the city of Los Angeles’ 311 system fielded 425 calls about bees or beehives. The greatest number (73 reports) occurred in San Fernando Valley territory covered by Council District 12.
In that same period, the dozens of candidates running for a local political office received nearly 30,000 individual donations — more than 12,000 went to Spencer Pratt, who finished third in the June election for mayor, proving that lots of donations is not enough to guarantee a spot in the runoff. Also during that time, 909,792 parking tickets were handed out across the city; 25.6% were for parking in a street cleaning zone, and of those, white vehicles were zapped 54,854 times.
I learned all of that not from months of filing and waiting for public records requests, but rather from spending about 30 minutes perusing publicly available city datasets. That’s the tip of the iceberg — there’s data on foreclosure filings, homeless encampment complaints, building permits and more.
Unbeknownst to many, Los Angeles has a rich repository of public data. And it’s not alone. As governments embrace demands for “transparency,” data has become ubiquitous. From beehive calls to crime reports, cities are gathering and releasing more data than ever before.
Sometimes this produces mere trivia — drilling down on those street cleaning infractions reveals that three white limousines were ticketed. However, the data also can prove useful to local leaders and community residents. For example, knowing that the Westside’s Council District 11 gets more complaints about potholes than any other district means repair crews could, at least in theory, be deployed there before the next winter storm.
Though the terms seem similar, I’m talking about data, not statistics. This is not one page assembling, say, overall counts of specific categories of crime, or the total number of unhoused people in the city and county. Instead, I’m referencing “raw data,” which in the case of those parking tickets means a dataset with 909,792 lines — one for each citation — and dozens of columns holding numbers or text about the type, location, fine amount and more. At first glance, it’s an endless, mind-bending scroll.
Learning how to use it is not easy, but you also don’t need a Ph.D. in math. Available filtering tools can break down dates and locations, for instance, allowing anyone to make sense of and localize the information (or you can download an entire data- set and utilize artificial intelligence). In fact, many people do this. The city’s data catalog includes “community created” options — one person used Department of Finance data to build a rundown of 597 full-service restaurants in Council District 5; it has been viewed 40,000 times.
I began learning about this through my work with Crosstown, a nonprofit newsroom launched by USC professor Gabriel Kahn, which allows journalists across the country to mine local data for stories of community importance. Crosstown’s proprietary technology allows the information to be applied on the neighborhood level, and I’ve written chart-filled pieces on topics such as illegal dumping (Van Nuys and Sun Valley get hit most frequently), streetlight outages (downtown recorded the most service requests in 2024) and pool permits (huge numbers in the Valley; very few in South L.A.).
More and more cities are making data publicly available. Chicago has a dataset showing alternative fuel locations, and its 311 database can identify rat complaints. A New York City dataset breaks down restaurant inspections across the five boroughs (there were 819 instances of inadequate personal cleanliness in the first half of 2026). San Francisco offers ready information about arsons, burglaries, homicides and other crimes.
Frustratingly, crime data in Los Angeles is currently unreliable. Although for many years the LAPD made copious information accessible, leading to Crosstown stories about which neighborhoods suffered the most burglaries, vehicle break-ins or identity theft, that changed when the department began transitioning to a new crime-records management system in March 2024. A supposed six-month changeover has still not been fully rolled out, meaning not only incomplete data about robberies and stolen vehicles but also missing information about other things the LAPD tracks, such as traffic collisions. It’s a huge loss in terms of both information and civic transparency.
Meanwhile, though, the city has expanded its 311 reporting — the aforementioned data on potholes and bees are new, and Angelenos can now track complaints about e-scooters cluttering the sidewalk, or tree emergencies. A dataset for 2026 foreclosures reveals that the most (302) were registered in South L.A.’s Council District 8.
Again, the data can lead to action — if a neighborhood suffers an overwhelming number of foreclosures, then knowing this is happening and directing financial resources to that area can help prevent more people from losing their home.
The data is out there.
