Do You Live in a Crime Zone?
Posted on August 4, 2008
Filed Under Felonies, Law, Los Angeles, News, misdemeanor |
Gone are the days when people left their doors unlocked when they left for work or went to the store. Do that today and you’re apt to come home to a house stripped of everything remotely valuable. Yet despite changing times, most of us feel fairly safe in our own homes in our own neighborhoods. Perhaps we shouldn’t. Look up your address on CriminalSearches.com and you may find yourself surrounded by felons, sex offenders, traffic violators and all manner of dangerous miscreants.
Developed by the same group of people who created PeopleFinders.com, CriminalSearches.com is one of several new websites that turn published crime data into map points. Just click on the Neighborhood Watch tab and plug in your street address. Up pops a map of your neighborhood with colorful squares pinpointing the locations of people convicted of a crime. You get a visual display of thefts, violent crimes, drug offenses, sex crimes, even traffic citations, thankfully the most numerous category in my neighborhood.
How do they do it? The same kind of computer-generated number crunching featured on the CBS-TV show Numbers. PeopleFinders.com president and COO Bryce Lane explained the new site uses monthly crime statistics reported by the government, crunching them down to the state and county levels. “What we’re really good at is establishing connections across all these different data sets, linking it back to a particular person,” Lane said. However, he admitted, the programs don’t include federal crime data and important data can be missing.
That’s the problem with relying on programs like this to determine how safe your neighborhood is. Data is not checked, validated in any way, nor updated. The program locates the reported residences of people convicted of crimes, not the locations of the crimes committed. There’s no fact checking or follow up. Addresses pinpointed are those reported at the time of conviction, so the person may have moved years ago, yet that address is still reported as the home of a criminal.
While it can be interesting and possibly helpful to use crime search programs on the internet, you shouldn’t rely on their accuracy. These sites can unfairly target innocent people who have moved into a home in which a felon once resided.
-LegalPro
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