Cirone’s experience is not unique. And while its inherent nature makes auditing of such practices difficult—after all, who watches the watchmen?—complaints leveled against multiple departments for arbitrary case closures on workable crimes suggests that fudging statistics might be on the increase. This is particularly understandable in an era in which many law enforcement agencies are financially strapped and facing diminishing personnel in the investigative ranks.
Despite the FBI’s efforts to screen UCR crime data submitted by law enforcement agencies before it is entered into the UCR national program, such screening only serves to weed out anomalies in the data and ensure that the data conforms to the national standard. In depth audits of the UCR data in direct comparison to the original arrest reports are rare. So the UCR’s flaws can simply be a matter of garbage in, garbage out. In addition, any given agency may go years without having a thorough review of its crime data collection practices. As a result, once the statistics are publicly reported, few changes are ultimately made to the reports generated by the UCR program.
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Back in May, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the crime statistics in the Crescent City appeared to be seriously out of sync. For 2011, New Orleans reported 199 murders, making it one of the most deadly cities in the nation. Criminologists consider the murder rate to be a fair indication of crime because murder is almost always reported whereas lesser crimes often go unreported. However, for the same year New Orleans recorded among the lowest number of aggravated assaults in the nation. The large disparity between the two numbers calls the veracity of the crime statistics into question.
Rick Rosenfeld, Curators Professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former preside
nt of the American Society of Criminology, told the Times-Picayune, “I find the growing gap between assaults and homicides to be very puzzling. For New Orleans to exceed the national figure by that much requires a good deal of imagination.”
While Rosenfeld and other crime statisticians did not publicly accuse New Orleans of fudging crime data, Rosenfeld added, “The two real possibilities are that citizens have reduced the rate at which they’re reporting these crimes to police, or that police have changed the way in which they classify such reports.”
The FBI cautions against ranking different areas based on crime statistics because it is difficult to determine the precise causes for underreporting of crime. It may well be that the citizens of New Orleans have become inured to the level of aggravated assaults and therefore forego reporting them. Whatever the reason for the decrease in non-lethal crimes, the numbers benefit New Orleans, which depends on tourism dollars in its rebuilding effort in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is less certain whether the reported crime rates benefit the individual citizens and visitors to the city.
Compounding the Problem
The misplaced emphasis on numbers and doctoring of them exacts an exorbitant price across the board, killing more than just the credibility of the perpetrators and inhibiting more than the mere filing of reports and data. As of 2010, many eligible candidates within NYPD were passing up opportunities to promote to captain. The reason? Many candidates didn’t want the numbers-focused stress attendant with the promotion.
“It’s the least-appreciated rank in the NYPD,” one NYPD lieutenant told the New York Post. “As a captain, you’re at work at your command 24-7, and when you go to Compstat, they make you feel that you haven’t…accomplished anything.”
As most officers know, CompStat is a geographic information-based system designed to map crime and identify problems, ostensibly to allow law enforcement leaders to proactively address criminal trends in their jurisdictions. To the minds of many within the profession, it has also become synonymous with weekly or monthly meetings wherein captains are raked over the coals in the presence of their peers for crime spikes committed on their watch. It is the kind of thing that lends itself to dramatization, as in the HBO series, “The Wire,” wherein a Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner ordered subordinates to lower felony statistics or find a new home: “I don’t care how you do it, just f**kin’ do it,” he barks at the captains who are shown drinking Maalox antacid before the meeting.
As stressful as the realities of such in-house aggravations are, far more damning are the real emotional and physical costs that can accrue in the aftermath of administrative cover-ups and the subterfuge employed to prevent them. Cirone notes that a student at a college in his old jurisdiction of Geneva, N.Y., had committed several forcible rapes.
“With the first two, the victims reported their rapes to campus security,” reflects Cirone. “The college blew the girls off and never reported the rapes to the police department. The third victim actually came to the PD after her rape and the investigation led to the other two and opened up Pandora’s box: another classic case of the colleges not wanting those crime stats known. I was involved in the arrest of the perp. We then found prior rapes from the perp from when he was in high school.
“One victim even committed suicide.”
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Beyond such individual cases, underreporting crime statistics can have detrimental effects on the community at large. Administrators and investigators may overlook criminal trends within a neighborhood because key incidents are not reported or are reported as lesser offenses. By failing to address the criminal activity during its nascent stage, departments face the more difficult and more dangerous task of cleaning up the problems after they have escalated. In the meantime, residents continue to be victimized.
Time to Clean Up?
One would think that law enforcement agencies would be naturally inclined toward doing the right thing. That the bean counters and number crunchers would, of their own initiative, perform an obligatory gut check and realize that however damning the impression of perceived failure may be, it does not diminish the credibility or standing of their agency the way lying about it does.
