The Los Angeles Times published a great story on Sunday on errors on crime maps, which are proliferating not only there but throughout the country and in Baltimore. Police agencies have complained about various maps, such as CrimeReports.com, which has marked wrong spots for crime in and around Baltimore.

We've had our own problems at the Baltimore Sun. We get calls about our homicide map showing murders in impossible locations, and even in different countries, and attempts to put up a map for Baltimore County crime has been thwarted because of bad locations. Every department gives us crime locations differently, and the computer has trouble matching them up with actual spots on the map. Earlier, a mistake put an inordinate number of plane crashes (zero would've been closer to the truth) in Essex.

The maps are fun and popular -- the Baltimore Sun has one showing homicides in the city and crime in Anne Arundel County -- but as with anything you have to be careful. The LA Times story is interesting -- the Police Department's map put too much crime in front of the newspaper building and its own headquarters.