Slashdot Mirror
Flawed Map Says L.A.'s Crime Highest Next to Police HQ
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.
For those who never played SimCity 4, it has a very strange bug where you would be notified about a "crime den" (implies high crime). However, when you went to the area being described, it was 99% of the time directly next to your police station.
Fortunately, it only lasted as a blip -- no increased crime, but still rather goofy.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
I know maps like these are a problem in the UK for a different, systematic reason: Crimes detected at the police station after an arrest have their location marked as having taken place at that police station. eg if someone is arrested and taken back to the station, and when asked to empty their pockets drugs are discovered, then the location of that crime is in the police station building. Of course, this sort of thing will happen every day...
Makes the crime map a bit interesting...
It is actually plausible that crime is higher by a PD. Consider that police operate effectively largely on the basis of force projection. Projecting force means they've got to spread out and, in part, create a perimeter within which they operate. The PD may have relied upon the force projection (ie the psychological influence the building would have) of the building, in part.
Also consider that a PD is more of a hub; police officers are coming and going to their respective patrol areas, going and coming off of shift. They are most likely not thinking "work" - ie, find criminals - at this time.
The PD may have been strategically placed where it was to dissuade crime in that specific area. I know that in the two largest cities in my state, the PDs are at, or near, the epicenter of low-income and crime (they're also just off the city centers). I lived near one of these PDs once, and it was indeed a higher crime area.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Here in the Land of Pleasant Living (and also the setting for Homicide and The Wire), Baltimore's main Police HQ is set between President, Fayette, Gay, and Baltimore Streets. For those of you who aren't familiar with the area, the corner of Gay and Baltimore Street is one end of the city's infamous and long standing red light district, and Police HQ backs up to the heart of "The Block". One side of Baltimore Street are strip clubs and streetwalkers, along with the ever-present junkies, pickpockets, and pimps. The other side is the back of Police HQ, and parking is reserved for squad cars of Baltimore's Finest bringing in Baltimore's Worst at all hours of the day and night.
Is that a rhetorical question? Can't speak for L.A., but my car suffered an attempted break-in via the windshield of all places while Sacramento cops sat in the parking lot of a La Quinta motel. I was traveling from Washington to Georgia, and got nothing more than a shrug and a "that sucks" from the police when I noticed the prised up seal on my windshield the next morning.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.