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."
Banks declined to say whether the crimes were lost before the information was sent to the private contractors who produce the maps or whether the problems took place when the contractor processed the data. It was also unclear whether the problem dated to the origin of the project or was more recent.
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.
When the LAPD launched the mapping site in March 2006, it was promoted as a publicly accessible version of Chief William J. Bratton's vaunted CompStat system. CompStat is a computer-powered tracking process first developed under Bratton at the New York Police Department that uses maps to track crime trends and guide deployment.
The internal CompStat system is managed by LAPD staff, and CompStat's top official emphasized that the problems with the public system had not affected the department's internal statistics.
"It's not something we had anything to do with," said Det. Jeff Godown, head of LAPD's CompStat unit. "It is what is. It's for the general public. For what we do [at LAPD] we have a much more robust thing."
By contrast, 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. Together, the two companies market a product known as ePolicing, which sells the mapping application first built for LAPD to other police departments.
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. However,reported crimes continued to be missing from both the LAPD map anddata sent toThe Times.
