Trends and analysis

For more than a decade, the Los Angeles Police Department has pointed to year-end statistics showing big drops in crime as proof the agency was making the city safer.

Los Angeles police are struggling to combat an increase in crime across the city this year, including a sharp spike in the number of people shot.

Jose Ibarra snapped on latex gloves, pushed aside an upturned sofa and rummaged through the belongings piled below an underpass in Silver Lake.

The killings started early Sunday morning, with a 30-year-old man gunned down behind an apartment complex.

For the first time in more than four decades, Los Angeles is on track to end the year with fewer than 300 killings, a milestone in a steady decline of homicides that has changed the quality of life in many neighborhoods and defied predictions that a bad economy would inexorably lead to higher crime.

Louis Watson, Dwight Taylor and Gregory Davis Jr. were the first casualties of the L.A. riots, mortally wounded in a volley of gunfire early on the evening of April 29, 1992.