1,380 Crimes At One Point

The Los Angeles Times highlighted the distortion caused by geocoding undecipherable addresses to a default location around the corner from City Hall.   The mapping application housed at www.lapdcrimemaps.org places all addresses the software is unable to geocode at the location in the 200 block of West 1st Street.  This has result in nearly 4% of all crimes being attributed to this location in the time period between October of 2008 and March of 2009.  This anomaly apparently went unnoticed by the Los Angeles Police Department until it was alerted by the Los Angeles Times.   As a short-term fix, the consultants that developed the mapping application, Lightray Productions and the sub-consultant PSOMAS (which does the geocoding), are plotting problematic locations to a new crime hotspot found off the coast of West Africa (corresponding to a lat/long of 0).

In the meantime, other applications such as EveryBlock that pull data from the LAPD site have propagated the error on their mapping sites.  Adrian Holovat, the founder of EveryBlock, responded by saying, “We have to assume at some fundamental level that the governments aren’t feeding us data that is complete garbage,” a sentiment echoed in their disclaimer which states, “Any mistakes found on EveryBlock should be sent to sources that provide the original data.”

Read more: Highest crime rate in L.A.? No, just an LAPD map glitch – Los Angeles Times