Aaron Mendelson

I use data to power accountability journalism.

Days of heavy rain was a good thing for our drought-stricken region in general, but it also caused flooding, mudslides, evacuations in recent fire burn zones and traffic chaos.

Former lawmaker Sebastian Ridley-Thomas is the son of influential L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Your eyes are not deceiving you: the Los Angeles Lakers are playing basketball at a blisteringly fast pace.

Hundreds of thousands of additional signatures are now required for a proposition to make the California ballot — making it harder and more expensive to place a measure directly before voters.

The jump in signatures required to qualify a proposition for California's ballot is the highest percentage increase since 1914 when women first voted in California.

Four years ago, California's Three Feet for Safety Act took effect. But in Southern California, the police haven't found much use for it. Since it passed, LAPD officers have written just 13 citations for violating the three feet law.

Cycling in SoCal is hazardous. The state's so-called Three Foot Law was supposed to make bicyclists safer from at one danger: passing cars. So why are some big Southern California police agencies almost never issuing tickets?

Storms caused chaos on the roads and the cancellation of at least one Hollywood meeting, but we at LAist wanted to know how much rain we really got. The answer: seven percent of a normal year's accumulation.

California's law enforcement agencies scanned license plates more than a billion times in 2016 and 2017, compiling massive databases of people's movement across the state while rarely detecting cars on police watchlists.

As we wait for the results to roll in, we set out to answer some commonly asked questions about voter turnout.

Sexual misconduct allegations against Los Angeles County employees sometimes took months and even years to resolve, a KPCC/LAist investigation found.