Are New York City Crime Numbers Being Falsely Reported?

It's been a year now since an extraordinary event occurred in local police annals: The heads of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Sergeants Benevolent Association charged publicly that the police department had cooked the books on crime statistics. Maybe you missed the news about the outcry that followed—the hasty audits, the City Council investigations, the criminal probes, the corruption commission hearings. But if you've missed all that, it's not your fault: There hasn't been any outcry. No comptroller audits. No City Council investigation. Nothing to date from the city's Commission to Combat Police Corruption. . . .

The basic complaint is that police commanders have forced cops to turn crimes that once would have been reported as felony assaults and grand larcenies into lesser offenses. The goal, accordingly, is to drive down the number of offenses included in a closely watched "index" of seven major crimes. . . .

"So how do you fake a crime decrease? It's pretty simple. Don't file reports, misclassify crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, undervalue the property lost to crime so it's not a felony, and report a series of crimes as a single event. A particularly insidious way to fudge the numbers is to make it difficult or impossible for people to report crimes—in other words, make the victims feel like criminals so they walk away just to spare themselves further pain and suffering." . . .

Thanks very much to Jason Morin for sending this to me.