Thousands of Crimes Missing From LAPD Map: Report

The Los Angeles Police Department's online crime map intended for public use has failed to include nearly 40 percent of serious crimes reported in the city, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times.

The omissions, dating back at least six months, include thousands of crimes known to LAPD officials and included in their official crime statistics, The Times reported Thursday.

The newspaper reported that among the 19,000 incidents between Jan. 1 and June 13 that do not appear at lapdcrimemaps.org were 26 homicides, 137 rapes and 10,766 personal, vehicle or other nonviolent thefts.

The lapses mean the map, touted by city leaders as an important resource for city residents to determine whether their neighborhoods are safe, presents a drastically incomplete image of city crime, according to The Times.

The Times said it 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 newspaper reported.

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, according to The Times.

The map available to the public at lapdcrimemaps.org is a joint venture between the Web development firm LightRay Productions and the engineering company PSOMAS, which manages it.

In an e-mail to The Times late Wednesday, PSOMAS Vice President Craig Gooch said his company had identified an inadvertent programming error and fixed it. But reported crimes continued to be missing from the LAPD map, the
newspaper reported.