By Jesse Leavenworth

Say you’re planning to visit Aunt Elsie in Atlanta, or maybe your kid is starting a career in Los Angeles.

Police departments in those two cities are among a handful in the nation that offer crime mapping on their websites. Plug in Elsie’s street corner or the neighborhood where Junior is apartment hunting, and the sites pinpoint recent serious crimes using shapes and colored dots.

For example, from March 4 to 7, within a mile radius of Melrose Place and Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, a crime map shows three burglaries, one theft from vehicle, one personal/other theft and one aggravated assault. In the same period in a circular area east of the city center at Winter and North Mott streets, Los Angeles police investigated one homicide, two violent robberies, three stolen vehicles, two thefts from vehicles and one aggravated assault.
L.A. launched the service last week, following similar efforts in San Diego, San Francisco and Atlanta. The idea is that sharing detailed information with citizens strengthens bonds and increases communication with police.

Hartford police are moving toward crime mapping, but there’s no timeline, department spokeswoman Nancy Mulroy said. The department now posts crime charts at www.hartford.gov/police. Figures are given for the four major areas of the city — Northeast, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest — as well as a breakdown for the 17 neighborhoods that lists not only serious crimes but also citizens’ calls for service, traffic tickets and other statistics. On Monday, the site listed stats for Feb. 26 to March 4.

Police want to offer more detailed and targeted information, and electronic crime-mapping is a goal, Mulroy said.

“Shared knowledge builds trust. It builds communication,” she said.
Along with the mapping service, L.A. police also have started regularly e-mailing residents crime alerts for their neighborhoods, notifying people, for example, of a rash of car break-ins. An officer suggested the “e-policing” program “after noticing that he was fielding daily calls from residents — all asking about the same crimes,” the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

Lightray, the Los Angeles company that designed the electronic police services, found that people preferred crime mapping compared with charts and spreadsheets because targeted results are available at a glance, company founder Kimberly Brooks said Monday.
And a resident who learns that a car was stolen or someone was robbed right around the corner tends to become less apathetic, Brooks said.

“It makes them care, and having people care about what goes on in the community is the critical factor in engaging them to help law enforcement,” she said.

But not everyone is pleased. Some real estate agents have complained about home buyers’ redlining neighborhoods “based on possibly misleading blips in crime,” the L.A. Times reported in its story on crime mapping.

Police Chief William Bratton was quoted as saying, “The reality is what the reality is. The reality is that in large parts of the city it is a good reality. But it is unfortunate certain areas of the city have more than their fair share of crime. But it is not a big secret. … This is an effort to inform.”

The most frequent type of call she receives, New Haven police spokeswoman Bonnie Winchester said, is from people moving to the city who want to know the crime level of a certain neighborhood. Winchester said crime mapping would nothelp people because she is only able to call up incidents at individual addresses. And besides, Winchester said, she doesn’t feel right about characterizing neighborhoods.

“Where I might be comfortable living might not be where you’re comfortable living,” she said.

New Haven police have hooked up with a news website (newhavenindependent.org) to offer people more detailed and up-to- date crime statistics. As in Hartford, the folks in New Haven see maps down the road.

“There’s no question we would like to do crime mapping at some point,” Independent editor Paul Bass said.

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Interactive LAPD service allows residents to view recent crime data from throughout the city.

Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2006
By Richard Winton, Times Staff Writer

Angelenos can play gumshoe Philip Marlowe and track crime patterns in their neighborhoods and throughout the city, thanks to a new, high-tech initiative from the Los Angeles Police Department.

The LAPD’s interactive crime mapping, which went up on the department’s website late Wednesday, allows users to pinpoint by date and location specific crimes, including robbery, assault, rape and homicide, up to five miles from their own addresses — or anybody else’s.

The LAPD has long posted weekly and annual crime trends for each of its 19 divisions. But like www.zillow.com , the real estate site that spits out values for individual houses, and Google mapping, where vacationers can see if their cars are still in their driveways, the maps bring the information home while appealing to a voyeuristic impulse.

The neighborhood watchdog can see whether a rumored burglary spree is real, parents can survey the block where their teenagers want to party, and house buyers can see for themselves if that street is safe.

“Now you can not only see how many crimes are occurring in the city, you can help find those crimes on a map and hopefully help us solve some of them,” said Chief William J. Bratton, speaking at a monthly media briefing.

San Diego pioneered the use of crime mapping a decade ago, followed more recently by San Francisco and Atlanta. But the LAPD’s effort, which covers more than 470 square miles, may be the most extensive yet.

The site, www.lapdonline.org , also offers an “e-policing” option for residents who want the latest crime news delivered straight to their e-mail inbox.

“Instead of waiting to find out on the news what is happening in your neighborhood, you can sign up for an e-policing program that keeps you informed and brings community policing to your computer,” Bratton said.

West Valley Senior Lead Officer Tony Valadez suggested the e-policing program after noticing that he was fielding daily calls from residents — all asking about the same crimes. The e-mails will be sent by local community officers, detailing offenses in the immediate area.

“It affords an officer the ability to send information instantaneously and surgically to a particular neighborhood,” Valadez said.

Kimberly Brooks, founder of Lightray, which developed the mapping and e-policing service, said the crime data run about a week behind. But soon lag time will be slashed to one day, she said.

“The visual maps really give the public a clearer understanding of whether, say, burglaries are occurring than a bunch of numbers on an Excel spreadsheet,” she said.

Realtors in other cities have been up in arms over house buyers’ redlining neighborhoods based on possibly misleading blips in crime. But Bratton said that doesn’t worry him.

“The reality is what the reality is,” he said. “The reality is that in large parts of the city, it is a good reality. But it is unfortunate certain areas of the city have more than their fair share of crime. But it is not a big secret…. This is an effort to inform.”

The website design and mapping were funded with $362,000 raised by the Los Angeles Police Foundation, not with government money. Bratton said the department planned soon to put out its own blog to spread its message.

“This is an evolutionary process; there is more to come,” he said.

Also on Thursday, Bratton disputed City Council members’ claims that the LAPD has gone over budget for officer overtime. The council is scheduled to take up the issue today.

“That overtime allocation for many years has always been underfunded,” Bratton said.

“They know every year that we are going to spend more than they allocate. It’s part of the budget games they play over there.”

The chief said the department has been unable to hire as many additional officers as it planned, so it will have plenty of money to cover pay for overtime.

“You may be hearing some of our council members raising that issue. It’s a bogus issue; has been and continues to be,” Bratton said. “The department is operating well within budget.”

Times staff writer Patrick McGreevy contributed to this report.