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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.
Get those properties while they're cheap! Well, cheaper than they already were, considering the economy.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
More seriously, they should probably have had the program throw an error in case they could not find a certain location rather than putting the crime report at an arbitrary location. That would have caused the problem to be discovered earlier.
Seeing how rogue so many police officers are, it might not necessarily be quite off the mark.
It's not a legally recorded crime unless someone is caught and convicted. It's not surprising that these crime maps would show this result - the places that police officers are most likely to be, are the places where the most crime is "found".
This is akin to saying that the places where the most vehicular crime occurs are where speed traps and automated traffic cameras are located.
If you had a world with absolute and omnipresent law enforcement, and that society could somehow actually function, my guess is that the map would match a map of the average human traffic in a given location.
Ryan Fenton
Wow, and after reading about the police in Phoenix, I almost wondered whether the heading was wrong.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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!
All know that the highest crime locations always are in legislative government institutions, not in police stations (police choose to do their crimes far from there).
Wonder if US highest crime is geolocated in Washington.
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...
Would you build a new police station in a crime-infested neighborhood or in a rich neighborhood that would complain about the criminals that police bring in?
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.
Men cannot be raped and blacks cannot be racists. It is written into the democratic partys national charter, accepted by all major news outlets, and become generally accepted politically correct behavior.
Isn't it a good thing that the police station is close to an area of high crime? Would we rather they were really far away?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Well, at least they're not too far off.
Twinstiq, game news
I'm an ArcGIS user who spends time coding geographically referenced data. On occasion, I process traffic crash locations. I don't work work for LA, and have no special knowledge of their process. But from my experience...
It is quite common to only get a 90 to 95 percent match to a location with a fully automated system. Spelling errors, wrong street prefixes (N instead of S), wrong zip codes, wrong cities, etc. are all things that will cause a bad location.
For the 5 to 10 percent that fall out, we have a routine that recodes based on a) county, then b) city, then c) street.
For the last 1 percent, the locations are physically located by hand.
As you might imagine, each step in the process takes effort and human touches to code correctly. If you don't have the time or the staff, a default location may be superior to 'location unknown'.
Is this a reasonable price for what seems to be an interface between google maps and the dept's crime database? Somehow it seems to me that a motivated person could do the basic design and coding in a few days. Then add in user feedback, layout redesigns ,etc., but still, should it really
take even a couple of months for one person? As a crude guestimate,
I would probably feel
a little greedy or overly conservative bidding 6 months, of course I
don't know the spec
or what's really involved. What am I missing that seems to imply
two person-years or more of work?
Ever enter an address into an on-line mapping program that it didn't recognize? They'll often show a map at a default location at the center of the zip code you entered. Same idea here.
I'd have no reason to doubt it. When I lived in Shalimar Florida someone robbed the bank that's right across the street from the police department with a shotgun and weren't caught for as long as I lived there.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The map is accurate for the most part, it's just a block off.
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 it because they are counting the staff at the LAPD as criminals?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Amongst my several different experiences with the incompetence and criminality that is the LAPD, they were perusing my belongings one day whilst I was locked in the back of one of their cars. They got pretty excited about a crate of Thompson smg magazines &c. that I had. Once they determined that I hadn't committed any crimes they could prove and went away, imagine my surprise to discover that one box of .357 and two boxes of .45 caliber Black Talon ammunition had found a new, better qualified, owner. When the shmoogs set fire to the shopping centers and called it an "uprising", I didn't condone it, but I understood what they were talking about.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.