In a disturbing – but, alas, unsurprising – report in the Times of February 6th, William K. Rashbaum reports that NYPD precincts, in order to revise downwards the value of items reported stolen (making, for instance, a grand larceny – a felony – into a petit or “petty” larceny – a misdemeanor) have resorted to on-line shopping:
More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics, according to two criminologists studying the department.
The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.
The totals for those seven so-called major index crimes are provided to the F.B.I., whose reports on crime trends have been used by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to favorably compare New York to other cities and to portray it as a profoundly safer place, an assessment that the summary does not contradict.
In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.
Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.
Retired Officers Raise Questions on Crime Data in The New York Times
Added to an institutional culture which specifically rewards certain behaviors (arrests made towards the end of a shift, or on days which will require court appearances on scheduled days off tend to generate more overtime payments than other arrests) – it’s not a good recipe for effective law enforcement.
