Geocoding error distorts L.A. crime statistics
A geocoding error caused 4 percent of all crimes reported on an LAPD crime map to be represented at a single location.
(Credit: LAPD)The Los Angeles Police Department is battling a virtual crime wave in downtown L.A. caused by an Internet map coding error.
If the department's online crime map is to be believed, one might think that a downtown location just a block from the LAPD's new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city. In the past six months, that location experienced 1,380 crimes--4 percent of all crimes mapped--or roughly eight a day.
The crimes were real, but the locations were off. A coding error within the system's geocoding--the process of converting addresses into map points--caused the crimes to be represented at a default location, according to a report Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. The mistake caused many crimes to be mapped miles away from their actual locations, causing false trends to be reported while masking real ones, according to the report.
The LAPD was apparently unaware of the problem until alerted to it by a Los Angeles Times reporter. Lightray Productions, the contractor that designed the site at a cost of $362,000, has promised to fix the problem, according to the report.
Besides the geocoding error, the system also faces challenges in how the streets are identified when typed into the system.
An LAPD spokeswoman told the L.A. Times that the department will work with Lightray to improve the system.
"It's not perfect," spokeswoman Mary Grady said. "We do the best we can with the software available."
The site gets 4 million to 7 million page views a month.
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven. 
Your second paragraph despite being entirely a run on sentence also has a new verb when was the last time you "thinged" something? Possibly you meant think. Maybe your writer's need to go back to English class for a refresher course in proper essay writing skills.
Government and Business sectors take note. This is a good example of why your IT people are not expendable staff. During times that they aren't building things they should be testing things. Often they carry broader knowledge on what to test than users. It may seem like busy work... but it's a much more tasking and productive activity than most realize.
This shows the need for real oversight and for the types who still work at newspapers since they seem to be the most capable of doing real investigative work.
Why? Because giving somebody a ticket makes the state money. Arresting people that actually pose a danger to society costs money. It's a sad sad world when a rape victim can't get her evidence processed because all the cops are off ticketing people to increase revenues.
- by Jessica_Thompson April 8, 2009 2:58 PM PDT
- Dear Steven,
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(10 Comments)I?d like to take this opportunity to clear up some misconceptions and clarify some points in the Los Angeles Times article on LAPD?s crime maps and subsequent Patt Morrison post.
As the Times reported, a small percentage of crimes that had uncertain addresses on LAPD?s popular Crimemaps feature were being assigned by default to a location near City Hall. We determined that the incorrect concentration of crimes was due to a faulty setting in the program and corrected the problem.
It is somewhat humorous that The Times asserts that to correct the problem, we moved the crimes off the West Africa coastline. Actually, that was The Times doing. We resolved the problem by giving the uncertain addresses a zero coordinate value so they would not show up on the map. The Times has access to LAPD crime data. Apparently they did their own mapping of the crimes and used the 0,0 coordinate value, thereby plopping the crimes off the coast of West Africa.
LAPD?s innovative Crimemaps application provides the public with information about crimes; it is not a public view of the Compstat system used by police officers. Crimemaps has served as an important and widely used tool for the department to communicate with the public as part of a broader community-policing program.
Lightray, a Los Angeles based software firm I direct, was contracted by the LAPD in 2004 to overhaul the LAPD?s sprawling 10,000-page website. The crime mapping project was part of this three-year effort. It was one of the first of its kind in law enforcement and included both crime mapping and ePolicing. ePolicing employs a database and custom-built newsletter tool that allows officers to email constituents about issues of neighborhood concern. The funding source for the entire project was from private dollars and not taxpayer funds.
We along with the public applaud the LAPD for making crime data readily available to citizens and facilitating citizen dialogue with local patrol officers.