Los Angeles Crime Mapping Goofs Again

The Los Angeles Times has followed up on their analysis of the accuracy of the Los Angeles Police Department’s online crime mapping application.  Back in April, the issue was that the default location for unmappable addresses landed 1,380 addresses at a location behind City Hall, skewing the analysis of safe neighborhoods.  Psomas, the consulting firm responsible for geocoding, resolved the issue by changing the default location to a long/lat of 0.  The new analysis by the LA Times shows that almost 19,000 crimes from this year (between January 1st and June 13th) are missing from the online mapping application.  The LA Times discovered the error when compiling their own crime mapping application, noting that while the LAPD officially reported 52,000 crimes during the first half of this year, only 33,000 crimes were mapped.  Psomas has stated in an email to the LA Times that the crimes were missing due to an “inadvertent programming error” that they claim has since been fixed.  As of the publication of the LA Times article, the 19,000 crimes were still missing from the map. 

Read more:  LAPD’s public database omits nearly 40% of this year’s crimes – Los Angeles Times