There’s all kinds of temptations and bad situations that can land you in jail in Sin City. We pulled the data from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department’s website to look at reported crimes to see if we could learn anything.
We grouped the crimes by type as follows:
The remaining categories remained the same as the crime portal. You can view the data and play with it here:
https://opendata-lvmpd.hub.arcgis.com/
Our data ranges from the Jan 1, 2023 to Dec, 21, 2023, which is when we began our inquiry
A. Theft, Violence, Property Destruction, and Drug Offenses make up over 92% of all reported crimes in Las Vegas according to the LVMPD Open Crime Portal.
So if you don’t want to get busted:
Pretty easy rules to live by right? However, once people visit Las Vegas, their inhibitions sometimes let go. They feel the freedom of this city, the lure of the big lights and opulent resorts. It’s easy to have a few too many drinks and then make a mistake.
This crime portal allows us to filter by crime type, and shows the number of incidents during the timeframe. The bigger icons, indicate multiple incidents. If you click on them it will give you the number of events and more details.
In the Fraud incidents map, we can see a heavy concentration of reported fraud all along Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the Strip.
If you zoom in, you can see hot spots where fraud is common.
You can overlay a map of Las Vegas if you’re unfamiliar with the landmarks. What we see is most of the drug-related crime reports center around big casino resorts like Ceasar’s Palace, located right on the Las Vegas strip.
If you want to find other people who like to party, now you know where to go. If you don’t want to get busted for drugs, avoid these areas. Simple right?
What we don’t know from this data is if these numbers are because a high number of tourists are committing drug-related crimes, or if the laws are easier to enforce on casino properties. (i.e. Plenty of cameras and security personnel to document evidence that will hold up in court.)
The low number of sex crimes reported by LVMPD shocked us. We would’ve expected to see large clusters centered around the major resorts as we see with fraud and drugs.
However, the sex crimes map is evenly distributed across the entire city.
You can make your own conclusions, but sex offenses constitute a minimal amount of reported crimes in Las Vegas.
What’s even crazier is that the “Sex Crimes” criteria on the map doesn’t even include Prostitution related crimes. You can’t even see it on the main map.
You have to go to this map (shown above) and filter for Code 40 crimes. Sadly this map will only show us the past 7 days. By our math, there are a little under 1,000 incidents per year (multiplying the 7 days we have data for to make a full year).
We’re unsure why they don’t show these on the main map.
Another interesting detail is that there are 19 incidents listed, but only 6 locations, meaning many of these spots accounted for multiple incidents.
Also during this time frame, the map shows 792 total crimes, meaning that Code 40 crimes accounted for less than 2.4% of all reported crimes.
Suppose you look at the original pie chart, theft, drugs, property destruction, and violence make up over 92% of all crimes reported in Las Vegas. So if you don’t want to get busted, avoid committing these crimes as they are common and reported often, especially on the Strip.
Either enforcement or crime rate is highest on the Las Vegas strip, so avoiding these areas can keep you off the radar and away from criminals.
