By Alex E. | Investigative Reporter, 562 LIVE Radio
This isn’t just my beat. It’s my backyard.
Let me start by saying this isn’t easy to write.
Not because I don’t have the words. I do. I’ve been sitting on thousands of them, digging through dusty PDFs, combing through crime maps, reading year-over-year trend reports until my eyes blurred. No, what makes this hard is what it reveals: we’ve let too many things slide in Long Beach. We've gotten comfortable with pain. We've mistaken temporary calm for lasting peace.
Violent crime in Long Beach isn’t just a headline. It’s not just some “statistic.” It’s a wound and whether it's healing or hemorrhaging depends on where you live, when you walk, and who you are.
I wrote this report not as a detached observer but as someone who's lived here, seen the bodies covered in tarps, watched the candles melt on sidewalk memorials. This is not a think piece. It’s a reckoning.
🧱 The Numbers Don’t Lie (But They Don’t Tell the Whole Truth Either)
Let’s talk data. Let’s go back to the year 2000.
We logged over 3,200 violent crimes in Long Beach that year. And while that might sound outrageous now, it was actually part of a broader downward trend from the even bloodier ‘90s, where murders routinely topped 100 annually.
Through the early 2000s and into the 2010s, violent crime dropped fast and hard thanks to better policing, a booming economy, and sheer exhaustion from the chaos of previous decades. By 2017, we hit what many city officials proudly called our “safest era.” Homicides fell to just 22, robberies dipped below 800, and assaults, though still the most frequent violent offense reached their lowest per capita levels in modern history.
But crime, like history, doesn’t move in straight lines.
Between 2019 and 2024, the decline slowed. Then reversed.
- 2021: Aggravated assaults jumped 11.2%.
- 2023: Murders dropped briefly to 26 — then surged again.
- 2024: We logged 38 homicides — a chilling 73% increase from just the year before.
And while the totals today are nowhere near the carnage of the 1990s, the trajectory has locals worried. I’d argue we’ve earned that concern.
Because when progress backslides, it rarely announces itself. It creeps. Quietly. Until we’re right back where we swore we’d never be again.
📍 Geographic Inequality: The Two Long Beaches
Here’s the part that’s both infuriating and painfully predictable.
If you live in Belmont Shore, Alamitos Heights, Los Altos, or Lakewood Village, you’d be forgiven for thinking Long Beach has no violent crime problem. These are some of the safest ZIPs not just in the city, but in Southern California.
You’ve got clean streets, good lighting, active neighborhood associations, responsive policing. Walk your dog at 11 PM and the biggest threat might be raccoons in the trash.
Now let’s flip the map.
If you live in North Long Beach, Washington, Westside, or Central Downtown, you already know — violent crime doesn’t just happen here. It lives here. It settles in, like smog in the lungs, never fully going away. The gunshots, the robberies, the assaults, they’re not just news. They’re background noise.
Let me be specific:
- Downtown Long Beach (especially around 6th and Pine): Over 1,000 violent crimes in 2024.
- North Long Beach: Spiking aggravated assaults, particularly along Atlantic and Artesia.
- West Long Beach: Robberies and shootings cluster near PCH and Santa Fe.
We created a heatmap (link below) using 25 years of incident data. The “hot zones” haven’t changed much in all that time. That’s not a policing issue, that’s a systemic failure.
⏰ When Trouble Comes
Violent crime doesn’t just have a ZIP code. It has a schedule.
The most dangerous hours in Long Beach, hands down, are between 8:00 PM and 2:00 AM, Friday through Sunday.
This pattern is true across multiple years, across multiple divisions. Robberies, assaults, even murders, they rise as the sun sets. That’s when people are out, drinking, clubbing, loitering. It’s also when street-level disputes turn fatal.
And it’s worse in summer. Always is. More daylight. More heat. More kids out of school. And more bullets flying.
This is why the LBPD adjusts patrol schedules seasonally, not because crime is random, but because it’s predictable. They know when it’s coming. The question is: what else are we doing besides bracing for it?
🧠 Violence by Design
What bothers me most is not the crime itself, it’s the predictability of it.
Because the violence in Long Beach isn’t just some chaotic force. It follows patterns. It follows neglect.
If you look at where the highest rates of violent crime occur, it matches up with:
- Poor infrastructure
- Fewer recreational spaces
- Lower median income
- Higher vacancy rates
- Liquor store density
- Fewer youth programs
This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a blueprint.
We have built a city where crime has room to breathe in certain corridors. And we’ve built sanctuaries in others.
What makes it even more frustrating is how long we’ve known this, and how slow we’ve been to fix it.
🚔 What’s Being Done (And Where It Falls Short)
The LBPD deserves credit for what they’ve done right.
They’ve rolled out real-time crime centers. Gun seizure programs. Community liaisons. Patrol boosts. Hot-spot suppression. They've engaged with local nonprofits to interrupt violence before it starts.
But enforcement is not prevention.
The root causes of violence, poverty, trauma, disconnection, desperation, aren’t solved by citations. They’re not arrested out of existence. They’re healed. With investment. With trust. With time.
And in many of Long Beach’s hardest-hit areas, time is a luxury no one can afford.
📈 What the Future Holds
If trends continue, 2025 will likely mirror 2024. Some categories might improve slightly. Others might worsen.
What worries me is not just the numbers. It’s the narrative. I worry we’ll normalize this, again. That another uptick in murders will become another shrug. That candles and teddy bears will go back on the curb like clockwork.
I’ve covered this city long enough to know: when we stop getting angry, we stop getting better.
We can do more. We can demand more.
More funding for trauma-informed education. More restorative justice programs. More summer jobs for teens. More mental health outreach. More lighting. More access.
Or we can keep writing this article every five years with new names and old statistics.
🎯 Final Thoughts: We Can’t Fix What We Don’t Face
Some of you reading this live in neighborhoods that haven’t seen a murder in 20 years. Others live on blocks where it happens every damn summer.
That divide, more than any crime number, is what keeps me up at night.
Because we’ve grown comfortable with two Long Beaches. And until we stop tolerating that gap, until we admit that violence isn’t just the problem of “those areas” or “those people”, we’ll stay stuck in this loop.
So here it is. My report. My plea.
Don’t look away. Don’t move away. Dig in. Speak up. Give a damn.
Because I do. I always will.
📍 Long Beach, California
🎙️ “We don’t just play music — we tell the truth.”
Explore the Crime Map:
🔗 Interactive Map: Violent Crime Trends 2000–2025 (Coming Soon)
Sources Used:
- Long Beach Police Department Crime Reports
- DataLB Crime Mapping Portal
- California DOJ OpenJustice Platform
- FBI Crime Data Explorer
- Public Policy Institute of California
- 562 LIVE Archives
Let me know if you'd like this exported for web publishing, print, or paired with more visuals. I can also generate additional crime infographics, a companion video script, or an interactive web version.
