Opinion: Where’s the crime? Not in my front yard!

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I can’t believe how lucky I am.

Seven or eight major crimes a day, right on my doorstep, and I’ve come out unscathed -- so far.

For three years, since the LAPD’s crime map went online, it has registered the most dangerous place in LA as ... right out in front of the Los Angeles Times. I can assure you that setting foot outside the building is not a life-or-death undertaking.

And yet, as my colleagues Ben Welsh and Doug Smith reported, any time the LAPD computer gets confused and can’t find the address where a crime actually took place, it assigns it by default to First and Spring Streets -- the northeast corner of what some of us still call Times Mirror Square. Because the LAPD crime-map computer evidently has some geography issues, it’s been unable to figure out a lot of crime locations in L.A., and so it’s put 4% of all the crimes it mapped -- a total of 1,380, robberies, assaults, grand theft auto -- at this same intersection, an intersection where the most serious crime I’ve witnessed is jaywalking, and that with reassuring infrequency.

The LAPD didn’t know this until The Times told it so. Is this some Parker Center programmer’s idea of funny? If so, perhaps the programmer should remember that the default means that 4% of the city’s mapped crimes are, according to the computer, occurring just a few blocks from police HQ. That ought to wipe the emoticon smile off someone’s screen.

It’s an amusing programming error but not a harmless one. Money and police deployment usually follow crime reports, which means that someone at Parker Center understands the error intuitively, or we’d have black and white patrol cars circling the intersection like Conestoga wagons. Surely this isn’t why the new LAPD headquarters is being built at the corner of First and Spring?

I’m wondering whether this mis-information has damaged property values. Crime maps are one factor that some sellers and buyers take into account when pricing, buying and selling property. Has this mistaken crime map affected the values of any properties? In L.A. this is no joke. As Ben and Doug point out, others use such online mapping data, too, to track liquor licenses, traffic accidents, even sex offenders. The mistakes multiply.

The LAPD, they wrote, will be putting a disclaimer on its site presently.

This isn’t the first time some online map has messed up. Google and Mapquest show a few blocks of First Street in downtown LA as Tom Bradley Boulevard. Not a single street sign says so, and I have never, ever heard a single soul throughout all of civic Los Angeles call it that.

It’s one of those honorary designations, and it was made nearly eight years ago. But the city council vote in 2001 is evidently as far as it got. No street signs were changed, no business addresses altered. But someone at Google and Mapquest took this very seriously, with the result that directions still insist that people turn left or right or proceed along Tom Bradley Boulevard. (Let’s get that cleared up, shall we? First Street should remain First Street. The late mayor has other things named for him, including the international terminal at the airport. Surely that’s even better. Let’s not confuse the tourists more than we already do.)

So, another salutary lesson learned about the fallibility of computers. Just because ‘’Google’’ and ‘’God’’ begin with the same two letters ...