Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Flawed Map Says L.A.'s Crime Highest Next to Police HQ

Posted by timothy on from the statistics-are-coming-from-inside-the-station dept.

CNET briefly describes how a poorly chosen default behavior has led to an online crime map of Los Angeles (on a site designed at a cost of $362,000) that shows that "a location just a block from the department's new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city." I wonder how often this sort of error would completely skew things like real-estate maps that attempt to show whether houses in a certain neighborhood are worth more than those in the one next door.

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Do you live in LA? by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's not a mistake. In LA, most of the HQ's *are* in high crime areas.

    Downtown, Van Nuys, etc...

    --
    Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
  2. Re:Perhaps criminals are getting more brazen by belg4mit · · Score: 3, Informative

    Choropleths are dangerous because most amateurs don't plot density.
    The eye naturally integrates over an area of uniform color, and so
    you must not create maps of raw magnitude if the mapped regions
    vary (significantly) in size. Otherwise, a small area of high-crime
    will appear less significant than a large area of moderate crime.

    --
    Were that I say, pancakes?