When we were last burglarized while living in Kaaawa, I signed up to get reports on nearby crimes from crimemapping.com
You can search for a city, a zip code, or just use a street address and request to be notified about crimes within 1 or 2 miles.
Those reports allowed me to track when there were mini crime waves, usually an increase in small thefts or car break-ins.
I haven’t gotten back in the habit if checking crimes since we moved into town. But when I got an alert this morning, I thought I would check the situation in and around Kahala.
The results were surprising, at least to me.
I assumed that Kahala would probably have a relatively high incidence of property crimes. There’s lots of property around here, and I thought crime would be proportionally higher. You know, the old adage, “Q: Why do you rob banks? A: That’s where the money is.
But the crime map for the 96816 zip code over the arbitrary period of November 1 through today. It looked different than I expected.
Reported crimes appear to be mostly spread through Waikiki, becoming much less frequent on the other side of Diamond Head through Kaimuki and Kahala.
And Kahala Mall, as well as the commercial corridor along Waialae Avenue, are a secondary focus of criminals, it appears.
The tourism connection isn’t a surprise. Meda and I published an academic paper back three decades, “Visitors as Victims,” which has been cited quite often over the years.
Tourists are “good” victims because they are unfamiliar with their surroundings, engage in risky behavior that they often wouldn’t do at home, and carry their “portable wealth” with them.
Anyway, there’s the crime map that surprised me.
Check out what crimemapping.com reports about your neighborhood and share your observations.
Comments welcome.
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Thanks Ian,
This is a great tool! Mahalo for bringing it to my attention ….the thing that surprised me about my local neighborhood (Palolo, Mauka) was the car break-ins and the car thefts…along the Kapahulu area, and even in Kaimuki around 12th. I’ll look at it in depth later on when I have more time to go back and check out other older time periods around our home. Very informative!
Funny that the map cuts off makai side of L??ahi. Fewer residences there, but Diamond Head Road often has sparkle of broken car window glass in parking areas.
The map cut-off was just the result of my quick “grab” of the graphic, I’m sure.
Agreed, this is great! HPD used to provide detailed information to neighborhood boards until about two years ago. The website they provided in lieu of their written reports only allows access to the most reports for each district. The crime mapping website is much better.
Crimemapping does not recognize my street. I have had to subscribe for my entire zip code, from which I assume I can zoom to specific locations?
The map looks pretty comprehensive to me. What if you try a location that’s close to you and adjust the radius?
I would try another address near your street.
It doesn’t appear to work on Maui. Apparently, MPD is not cooperating with the site.
After several tries, we connected our street address to the map. Pleased to discover that in the most recent week reported, the most serious “crime” that was brought to the attention of police in a 2-mile radius was a graffiti attack a few blocks away.
What you showed seemed like a surprisingly large number of crimes so I checked San Francisco to compare. The period was only a week and showed +800 crimes & said the map cannot plot anymore crimes.
Gee that’s a lot of miscreants.