This episode contains brief discussion of violence and reference to outdated terminology involving sex work.

Listener discretion is advised.

This is the fall line.

To write about crime, we need data.

And you might be surprised how difficult it can be to come across accurate accounting of violent crime.

Do we truly know the precise number of homicides committed each year in the United States?

If you Google that data, you'll certainly get a number.

But how has it been compiled?

How many murders go unaccounted in certain tabulations?

Either because they are ruled accidental deaths or natural deaths or because statistics aren't recorded by one agency or another.

And the number of homicides, that's just one piece of the equation.

How many of those homicides are actually getting solved?

How many of the same kinds of murders are happening in a particular city or in a particular time period?

And what can it indicate?

Can that data identify a hotspot?

One that could indicate an active serial killer or even multiple killers?

Those questions are just a few that the algorithm developed by the Murder Accountability Project.

A volunteer run organization founded by retired journalist Thomas Hargrove has set out to answer.

The project, nicknamed MAP, was designed to help quantify the FBI's homicide data

and create topographical connections between those numbers.

That is, to help researchers and law enforcement see from a macro level the connections between cases in a given area.

And to spot other problems too, like cities with very low solv rates on homicides,

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