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[From Ex-New York Police Officials Question Crime Data Integrity - NYTimes.com]

As crime statistics have grown in importance in policing, there is always a worry that they are being massaged. There is tremendous pressure on the police to constantly reduce crime based on crime statistics. Viewers of The Wire are familiar with how crime statistics were manipulated in that show. A recent survey of New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers indicated some issues with manipulating crime statistics:

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.

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.

rshah Crime