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Geography of the escort service scandal

Among many breaking news stories this week there was one that made a splash just before the Internet release of the phone records. Since then it has been reported that several interest groups including those with particular point of view have been poring over these lists.

Much of these efforts and scrutiny by media has yet to produce shock and awe type of revelations. But that could change. May be the potential for a big expose` has the Media continuing to cover the story.

Since we are the map people, spatial dimension of a(ny) story is of interest to us. So Geocommons decided to digitize and geocode a subset of these phone records, specifically telephone records from two time periods, December 22, 2000 to March 22, 2001 and December 22, 2004 to March 22, 2005.

What do these maps show?

Majority of the calls originated in Washington DC proper, Silver Spring, Baltimore, Columbia, Glen Burnie and Frederick in MD; Arlington, Alexandria, Lorton and Woodbrigde in VA and a few other DC suburbs.

Distribution of escort service calls in 2001 (1st quarter)

Distribution of escort service calls in 2005 (1st Quarter)

The rest of the hotspots are scattered across the lower 48 states, these clusters are in Southern California (Escondido); Tampa, FL (Tampron Spings area in 2005) and Orlando, FL (in 2001) and North-East Atlanta, GA.

Interestingly, the list of distinct phone numbers is relatively small, suggesting cliquishness of callers and possible exclusivity of the services. Further, a smaller subset among these can be characterized as frequent callers. Yet another interesting apsect is the temporal distribution of these calls: compared to any other month, January 2005 had the highest number of calls.

While the DC Madam scandal story is still unfolding just below the radar of attention grabbing news, intention is to digitize and geocode data for other time periods. So come back and visit us at Geocommons and use key word search (“Booty Calls“) to explore maps/data.

PostScript

These maps do NOT reveal locations of individuals whose phone numbers are on the DC Madam’s list. Instead, these maps show patterns of spatial distribution of calls to escort service. The heat maps were generated based on totals of the phone numbers that share the first six digits of the ten digit phone number. Unlike the calling area codes which are identified by the first 3 digits, the first six digits of a typical 10 digit number helps determine the geographic locations of local exchanges to which the phone numbers are tied.

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