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Posted by Monty Solomon on April 6, 2009, 4:50 am
Highest crime rate in L.A.? No, just an LAPD map glitch
The department's online map incorrectly showed many crimes downtown
-- near City Hall and the police station -- when its 'geocoding'
software couldn't interpret the true address.
By Ben Welsh and Doug Smith
April 5, 2009
Los Angeles Times
On Monday it was a grand theft auto and two robberies, on Tuesday two
more robberies and four aggravated assaults. By Friday the toll had
risen to 39 major crimes.
And, according to the Los Angeles Police Department's website, that
week late last month was pretty typical of the mayhem around the
corner from City Hall.
Since the inception of the LAPD's online crime map three years ago,
the 200 block of West 1st Street has consistently shown up as the
most likely place in Los Angeles to be victimized by crime.
But don't believe everything you read on the Internet. The spot,
directly in front of the Los Angeles Times and a block from the new
LAPD headquarters, is actually quite lawful.
Behind the apparent enigma is a case of virtual unreality. The crimes
reported there were real, but they actually happened somewhere else.
The only thing they had in common was an address that proved
impossible for a computer to find.
The distortion -- which the LAPD was not aware of until alerted by
The Times -- illustrates pitfalls in the growing number of products
that depend on a computer process known as geocoding to convert
written addresses into points on electronic maps.
In this instance, www.lapdcrimemaps.org is offered to the public as a
way to track crimes near specific addresses in the city of Los
Angeles. Most of the time that process worked fine. But when it
failed, crimes were often shown miles from where they actually
occurred.
Unable to parse the intersection of Paloma Street and Adams
Boulevard, for instance, the computer used a default point for Los
Angeles, roughly 1st and Spring streets.
Mistakes could have the effect of masking real crime spikes as well
as creating false ones.
...
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-geocoding-errors5-2009apr05,0,5966285.story
***** Moderator's Note *****
On first glance, this seemed unrelated to telecom. Then, I wondered if
the E911 system relies on this or a similar technology to map
telephone customer's addresses to route-finder software in
emergency-response vehicles. Comments?
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never
see your post! Thanks!
We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator
atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via
email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the
digest, you don't need to change anything.
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