L.A. Now Live: The Times chronicles L.A. County’s homicides

The Homicide Report is a listing by The Times of all homicide victims reported by the Los Angeles County coroner. Any person who dies at the hand of another in Los Angeles County, and whose death is recorded by the coroner, is included in the report, which is updated weekly.

The report strives to augment those basic facts with additional reporting about those cases, as well as other subjects relevant to homicides.

Join us at 9 a.m. when we talk with Times reporter Nicole Santa Cruz about the report, what it is intended to accomplish and what readers expect from it.

Homicide Report: Track every killing in L.A. County

The website was created in January 2007 by Jill Leovy, a veteran writer for The Times, as a reported blog. Leovy, the author of nearly all the unsigned posts from 2007, launched the report as a way to balance The Times’ crime coverage. As a practical necessity, printed editions of The Times, like those of other metropolitan newspapers, give the most attention to the most unusual, and thus statistically marginal, homicide cases.

Initially, the Homicide Report blog provided details on many cases that did not appear in the newspaper’s print edition.

The new version of the report, which launched Jan. 26, 2010, merges the blog posts with a searchable database and interactive maps. The maps break down homicides by various categories, including race/ethnicity, age, neighborhood/city, gender, method of death and more. Readers can link to the original Homicide Report to read archived comments and the original posts. In some cases the content has been edited to fit into the new style and format.