Source: International Herald-Tribune Pubdate: 4, Aug 1998 Contact: http://www.iht.com/ Author: Fox Butterfield, New York Times Service CRIME UP OR DOWN? DOUBTS ON DATA Falsely Reported Statistics Reveal Pattern of Pressure on Police PHILADELPHIA---Senior police officials around the United States are concerned that a sharp drop in crime in recent years has produced new pressure on police departments to show ever decreasing crime statistics, and might be behind incidents in several cities in which commanders have played self-serving games with the data. So far this year, there have been charges of falsely reporting crime statistics in New York, in Atlanta and in Boca Raton, Florida. The charges have resulted in the resignation or demotion of high-ranking police commanders. In Boca Raton, for example, a police captain, acting with the knowledge of the chief of police, systematically downgraded property crimes like burglaries to vandalism, trespassing or missing property, reducing the city's felony rate in 1997 by almost 11 percent. Experts say they believe these incidents do not mean that the nationwide drop in crime since 1992 is illusory. But they are beginning to question whether politicians seeking off1ce, the news media and the public should attach so much importance to the release of figures. In Philadelphia, the city has had to withdraw its crime figures from the national system maintained by the FBI for 1996, 1997 and the first half of this year because of sloppiness, under-reporting and downgrading of serious crimes into less serious incidents. Because of Philadelphia's size---it accounts for 2 percent of all killings in the United States---the removal of its numbers could skew the crime rate for the whole nation. But Harlan McEwan, a deputy assistant director of the FBI, said he was confident the agency had methods to adjust the national rate even without Philadelphia's figures. The 1997 crime figures will be published this fall. The impact on Philadelphia will be more telling. "I can guarantee you my crime is going to be way up this year," said John Timoney, who took over as Philadelphia's police commissioner in March. "But I don't care. If we are going to get this right and reduce crime, we have to start with accurate statistics. " Gil Kerlikowske, the former police commissioner of Buffalo, New York, said the pressure on police departments to prove their performance through reduced crime figures, with promotions and pay raises increasingly dependent on good data, "creates a new area for police corruption and ethics," along with traditional problems of brutality and payoffs. Mr. Kerlikowske suggested that there had been too much focus on the eight major crimes,counted by the bureau in its crime index: the violent crimes of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault along with the property crimes of burglary, theft, stolen cars and arson. "There is too little focus on lesser crimes, which are not counted by the FBI," Mr. Kerlilcowske said, "like drug sales, prostitution and graffiti, which are more meaningful to the overall quality of life because there is so much more of them." A common thread running through many of the incidents of police officials altering crime statistics has been that police commanders have downgraded felonies like aggravated assault and burglary, which are reported to the FBI to misdemeanors like vandalism, which are not reported to the bureau. As less serious crimes, they do not show up on a city's crime reports. One of the first acts by Mr. Timoney who was a career police officer in New York, where he helped pioneer the city ' s highly regarded computerized crime statistics system, was to set up a quality assurance division. It soon discovered that serious crimes throughout Philadelphia were being under reported by about 8 percent, he said in an interview. Much of this, he said, was a result of "stupidity or carelessness and was not intentional." But he discovered earlier this month that the youngest district commander in the city, Daniel Castro, a captain who had an excellent reputation for introducing community policing and aggressively eliminating drug dealers from the streets of West Philadelphia had greatly exaggerated his reports of [crws redpotlon](?). Mr. Castro reported an 80 percent drop in serious crime in his district over the last year. But a review found that Mr. Castro had downgraded many robberies, burglaries and thefts to cases of "missing property." Mr. Castro was removed from his command. In New York, Kenneth Donohue head of the Police Department's Transportation Bureau, was forced to resign earlier this year after the police commissioner, Howard Safir, said he had presided over an elaborate scheme to reclassify incidents on the subway as street crimes. Mr. Safir said the manipulation had gone on for years and had underestimated crime in the subways by about 20 percent. But he stressed that it had not affected New York City's overall crime rate because the crimes had merely been shifted to the streets and were reported by the regular police precincts. - --- Checked-by: "Rich O'Grady"