Maricopa Realtor Deborah Farhat scrolled through the online residential real estate website Trulia late last year and noticed something startling.
The crime statistics displayed on the site for the nearly 45-square-mile city of Maricopa showed criminal activity roughly 10 times greater than the entire city of Phoenix. When Farhat looked at other cities, she saw crime numbers only a small fraction of what Maricopa showed.
Today, Trulia’s crime numbers for Maricopa still come up nearly five times greater than the city of Phoenix, despite the fact that Maricopa has many fewer crimes. Trulia lists properties for sale and rent, as well as neighborhood information.
“It makes our city look like we have something seriously wrong out here,” Farhat said.
Realtor Tony Schumacher of Maricopa Real Estate said the data on Trulia could become a problem if it scares off even a small percentage of buyers from looking at homes in Maricopa.
Schumacher estimated about 75 percent of homebuyers he works with use an online tool as the first step toward looking at homes. And a spokeswoman for Trulia said the website’s crime maps are among the top two most clicked maps on the website.
While some realtors are concerned about the data scaring off potential Maricopa homebuyers, neighborhood block watch captains and police acknowledge that while the data is imperfect, it is a valuable resource the community can use.
Maricopa police gives statistics to Crimereports.com, which provides public access to crime mapping.
“Crimereports.com is great, but the downside is that it doesn’t show you if there’s a trend,” said Desert Cedars block watch coordinator Terrell Hoffman.
Hoffman said she uses the data to obtain an overall picture of crime in her area and then follows up with the police department’s volunteer crime prevention specialist Joi-Ashli Gibbs to gather more information.
“I can educate them on … this is how the call came out, and this is what actually occurred,” Gibbs said.
According to a spokeswoman for Trulia, the company obtains its crime data from two companies called crimereports.com and spotcrime.com, which obtain the data directly from police departments.
The reason Maricopa appears to have so many crimes online is because the Maricopa Police Department reports not just actual crimes but nearly all calls for service to crimereports.com, said Ricardo Alvarado, the department’s public affairs specialist.
Although traffic stops, homicides and certain types of sex crimes are not included in the list, nearly every other type of call is submitted two or three times per day, Alvarado said. Since a call for service is nothing more than someone requesting police services for any reason, the data is not always going to reflect actual crimes.
“It’s not a perfect system,” Alvarado said, “but we do our best to keep the information accurate and as transparent as we possibly can.”
Other police departments around the Valley have different ways for reporting crime data to the public, but there is no standard approach. The data posted on Trulia and crimereports.com varies from city to city depending on when and what the police department in that city reports.
Crimereports.com did not return requests for comment on how they obtain their numbers and how they ensure their accuracy. However, police departments confirmed how they provide their data to the company.
For example, Gilbert police spokesman Sgt. Jesse Sanger said his department reports criminal offenses to crimereports.com and the data is reported once per day.
Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump said his department has contracted with another company called BAIR Analytics, which operates raidsonline.com, but that the department’s internal system must be updated before they can begin reporting real-time data.
Crump does not know how crimereports.com is obtaining crime data from his police department, but said Phoenix police post some crimes on its own website and report crimes quarterly for the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. A search on crimereports.com under “Phoenix, Arizona” shows a crime map and attributes the source of the data as Arizona State University Police Department.
“It would be ideal to have real-crime data, instead of ‘The police department’s phone rang 50 times today,’” Schumacher said regarding Maricopa’s data.
Trulia Product Public Relations Manager Korina Buhler said her company is proud of its heatmaps, which show everything from area crime to school boundaries and even natural disasters. She said the maps are created by analyzing the density of 12 months of crime data across census blocks.
“We believe we’re painting a pretty clear picture of the safety of the neighborhood,” Buhler said.
She added, “The crime heatmaps are built into our mobile apps because it’s the No. 1 thing our consumers ask for along with school boundaries.”
