Ben Welsh and Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2009
The Los Angeles Police Department’s online crime map intended for public use has failed to include nearly 40% of serious crimes reported in the city, a Times analysis has found.
The omissions, which date back at least six months, include thousands of crimes known to LAPD officials and are included in their official crime statistics.
Among the 19,000 incidents between Jan. 1 and June 13 that do not appear at lapdcrimemaps.org:
* 26 homicides
* 137 rapes
* 10,766 personal, vehicle or other nonviolent thefts
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The lapses mean that the map, touted by city leaders as an important and innovative resource for city residents to determine whether their neighborhoods are safe, presents a drastically incomplete image of city crime.
Some residents have tried to bring the problem to the department’s attention, to no avail. Jason Insalaco, a former resident of Atwater Village who uses the pen name GlendaleBlvd, posted a message about unmapped crimes in that area on a neighborhood message board earlier this year, but his concerns were dismissed by the department. He said he was outraged by the site’s inaccuracies.
“The community is not being accurately informed,” Insalaco said. “They are being misled and lulled into a false sense of security.”
The Times discovered the magnitude of the problem while developing its own online map to display LAPD data. Comparing the LAPD map with the department’s official totals revealed that thousands of crimes through mid-June were missing. The department’s official crime tally recorded more than 52,000 serious crimes this year. But the database on the public mapping site contained fewer than 33,000 for the same period.
Among the omissions, caused by a programming error, were more than a thousand violent robberies, including two out of seven street robberies committed in April and May by men posing as police officers.
The Times informed the LAPD last week of the discrepancy and specific examples of missing crimes.
This week, the LAPD added about 20,000 crimes from 2009 to data it provides The Times. But as of late Wednesday, those additions had yet to appear on the LAPD map.
“The department is looking into the issue that you brought to our attention,” said Lt. Rick Banks, the officer in charge of the online unit. “When we come up with our findings, we will respond to you.”
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The missing crimes mark the second major problem with the LAPD’s public maps. In April, The Times found that programming errors by the LAPD’s contractor had caused thousands of crimes to be mapped in the wrong place, mistakenly portraying the Los Angeles Civic Center as the most crime-ridden location in the city. To resolve the problem, the contractor has dropped those crimes from the map, but has not yet placed them in their correct locations.
