Philadelphia police mapping data say some crimes occurred at Disney World

When the Philadelphia Police Department tracks crime, the location of each incident is mapped using coordinates. For example, a shooting that occurred on a certain city block is inputted into a database to help analyze where shootings are happening.

Since 2015, thousands of locations that were originally reported by officers and had a street name misspelled or had some other fault were given the same coordinates: Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando.

That doesn’t directly impact the reporting or investigation of a given crime. And Kevin Thomas, who oversees data for the Police Department, said it didn’t affect staffing decisions because fewer than 2% of incidents had problematic locations.

But one former deputy police commissioner called the issue “poor optics.”

The crime data, which is available to the public, include the block where each incident occurred — as well as its precise latitude and longitude.

There have been 589 shootings with victims since 2015 — about 4% of all shootings — that were given coordinates as having occurred at Disney’s Cinderella Castle, according to data inputted into the Police Department’s public crime database.

Until at least early August, the data with the Disney World coordinates has been publicly available on the city’s opendataphilly.org website. The Disney World coordinates no longer appear in the crime data.

NBC10 had been working on a story about the Disney World coordinates and broadcasted a report late Thursday night.

Thomas, the current civilian director of research and analysis for the department, said in an interview Thursday night that the coordinates for Disney World were recently removed from all the data sets.

Many years ago, someone on staff decided to switch the default coordinates to Disney World, Thomas said, adding that he did not know who did the switch but believed that the amusement park was viewed as an innocuous location.

» READ MORE: Philly's gun violence has been concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks

Erroneous or problematic locations have reverted to what they used to be: zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude, Thomas said. The location is where the prime meridian and equator meet off the coast of Africa.

Because of issues with computer mapping, even some correct addresses still wind up in the Atlantic Ocean in the Gulf of Guinea, he said.

Joseph P. Sullivan, a former deputy commissioner with the Philadelphia Police Department, said Thursday that “the matter calls for further inquiry to determine if the department’s crime data and crime maps, which are both released to the public, and are used by department management to make deployment and staffing decisions, were impacted.”

Thomas said there was no negative impact. No deployment or other staffing decisions were affected because fewer than 2% of crime and other incidents had problematic locations, he said.

The reporting the department is required to make to the state and the FBI has not been impacted because those reports are not dependent on precise locations of crimes, Thomas said.

Thomas said the department may consider a process to correct locations individually, but that could prove time-consuming for his small staff. The crime-reporting system is automated to provide data to police and the public as quickly as possible.

But, Sullivan noted, it is “especially important since every incident shown on the maps or included in the data represents citizens who were victims of crime.”

He added, “I’m not reaching any judgment. This might just be poor optics, but we have to be sure and either way it has to stop.”

Graphics editor John Duchneskie contributed to this article.