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Flawed Map Says L.A.'s Crime Highest Next to Police HQ
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Apr 05, 2009 04:31 PM
from the statistics-are-coming-from-inside-the-station dept.
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.
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Quick! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Are L.A. cops THAT crooked?
Re:Quick! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Don't get me started (Score:3, Informative)
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. W
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And I posted anonymously so you couldn't tell who I am! Ta-ta!
-jcr
That's some mighty fine detective work there, Lou.
Perhaps criminals are getting more brazen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
There's pros and cons... What if you know the police district and want to give corrent district values, even there's no specific address? If not providing an address makes the crime "go away", there could be a tendency to have more "unlocalized" crime. Probably it was a case of conflicting requirements that said all crime was to represented and all crime had a location that nobody really thought through.
I think your suggestion is unrealistic because sometimes there's no one good address. If you caught a spe
Re:Perhaps criminals are getting more brazen (Score:5, Insightful)
There's ways to balance that, depending on what your needs and visualization methods are. For example, if you know that a significant proportion of your crime reporting gives only district-level precision, not pinpointing to specific addresses, then it'd be more honest data presentation to just produce a colored-in map on a district-by-district level, and not attempt to give more detailed maps. If you do still want to give the more detailed maps, then at least average the un-localized things across the district instead of putting them all in one place.
To use an actual (fairly simple) example that came up in my work recently: say you have some date figures, most of them with years but some only with decades. The wrong thing to do is to put the "1960s" datapoint at 1965, because then you get spurious spikes in the middle of every decade. Several more correct options are: just produce decade-by-decade visualizations, or else produce year-by-year visualizations, but assign a "1960s" datapoint as a 1/10-weight datapoint in each of 1960 through 1969.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'd like to think that it's more cops getting busted for their own abuses but I'm not that naive.
Re:Perhaps criminals are getting more brazen (Score:4, 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.
Parent
Re:Perhaps criminals are getting more brazen (Score:5, 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My parents used to cruise and street race in Southern California, and the preferred place to do it was about a block from the police station. The reason was simple: aside from shift changes (times for which were well known), there were no cops there. They were deployed far enough away that the racers only rarely saw a patrol car in the area, let alone on the racing street itself.
Maybe it is correct? (Score:2)
Flawed? (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing how rogue so many police officers are, it might not necessarily be quite off the mark.
Re:Flawed? (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean, "not quite off the mark"? It's a whole block out!
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
ZOMG CORRUPT COPS!
Criminal activity detection... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Are you implying police officers commit the most crimes?
No joke, there are places [wikipedia.org] where this is believable.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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".
Are you implying police officers commit the most crimes?
No joke, there are places [wikipedia.org] where this is believable.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that, in places without cops, no crime gets reported. No cops = no arrests, ergo no crime information about the area.
RTFA (Score:2)
Your theory is interesting and all, but (and I know this may be a shocking concept for a Slashdot user) the actual article says what actually happened, and it's not at all like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Crimes have their own geography.
Every large city has streets known for prostitution and drugs. Districts where abandoned homes and industrial sites attract arsonists and scavengers. The college campusus, parks and trails which become the stalking grounds for a rapist.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if there's a doughnut/coffee shop or cafe around the corner from the PD that would attribute to this statistical anomaly.
Re: (Score:2)
I was mugged; I reported the crime. (No fun at all, but at least they didn't shoot me.)
Who "they," the muggers or the cops?
Not Phoenix then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, and after reading about the police in Phoenix [slashdot.org], I almost wondered whether the heading was wrong.
OT - thanks for SimCity tag! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I've gotten this with almost every city I've ever built in that game... I would have a poorly-covered area that would be crime-ridden. Then I'd slap down a police station right next to this "crime den", and 50 years later I'm still getting hassled about how dangerous the area is. Oops?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or the mysterious corner of the airport...
Of course, it's common knowledge that every murderer, rapist, tagger, and druggie goes to the corner of the local airport to commit their crimes.
Clearly it's the corner of the Executive Lounge. You just think it lacks realism.
Wrong picking (Score:4, Funny)
Wonder if US highest crime is geolocated in Washington.
Statistics, statistics... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Petty criminals will be picked up kept in the cells for the night and let out in the morning -- then they go and commit a local crime. "Crime" doesn't necessarily mean serious crime like murder or rape.
Seem like a no brainer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe it's just close enough for government work...
Do you live in LA? (Score:4, Informative)
That's not a mistake. In LA, most of the HQ's *are* in high crime areas.
Downtown, Van Nuys, etc...
It *is* that way in Vancouver (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside [wikipedia.org]
There you have it (Score:2)
Er... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
It's the LAPD! (Score:2)
Why is it surprising that the most crime in the city occurred in their headquarters? The only confusing thing is why they actually REPORTED it!?! ;)
Rollin's down the street in my 64 (Score:2)
At least (Score:3, Funny)
What's the problem? (Score:2)
It's hard to imagine a software glitch causing this exact behavior. And what's the problem with having Po-po HQ in a high crime area? Saves on commuting, at the very least.
AT least two police stations in my city are right in the heart of crime areas. But the rest are in less crimey areas. What's the problem?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Geoprocessing errors are common (Score:2, Interesting)
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 ro
$362,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It has to meet strict security guidelines and undergo expensive independent security audits before it's approved for use?
No Doubt (Score:3, Informative)
Actually,,, (Score:4, Funny)
The map is accurate for the most part, it's just a block off.
Baltimore (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
LAPD (Score:3, Funny)
Is it because they are counting the staff at the LAPD as criminals?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)