NYPD Commissioner's Record in Los Angeles Marred By False Data

 
This is why I am skeptical whenever the Cambridge, MA police spokesman boasts about crime statistics in Cambridge. I know you can trust him. He is not like the rest. Ahem! It all depends on the timing. When it is nearing budget allocation period, crime stats go up. When it is time for performance review crime goes down.

[From article]
An estimated 14,000 cases from 2005 to 2012 were altered, leading people to believe the city’s crime rate was lower than it actually was, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.
Before his tenure began as NYPD commissioner, Bratton served as the chief of the LAPD from 2002 to 2009. Using the revolutionary CompStat system, which crunches crime numbers and determines where incidents are likely to occur, he helped lower crime within the city for seven consecutive years.
But data now shows that those numbers were significantly skewed by police — and that the number of violent offenses in LA was actually 7 percent higher than what authorities reported during that period, the Times reports.
Serious assault cases were also 16 percent higher.
[. . .]

 

“We know this can have a corrosive effect on the public’s trust of our reporting,” said Assistant Chief Michel Moore, who is in charge of the LAPD’s system for tracking crime.
“That’s why we are committed to…eliminating as much of the error as possible.” he explained.
When asked about the Times’ story and whether he’s concerned the underreporting is now happening in the Big Apple, a spokesman for Mayor de Blasio said, “The Mayor has complete confidence in Commissioner Bratton’s leadership. He has led the effort to make New York City the safest large city in the country.”
But John Eterno, a retired NYPD police captain and professor who studied NYPD crimes stats through 2012, argues otherwise.
“I talk with the officers who are still out there and they tell me these practices are continuing,” he told The Post, claiming “the pressures come from Compstat, from headquarters, and indirectly filter down through the rank and file.”
[. . .]
“These are clear examples that the numbers are still being gamed under Bratton,” he said. “It’s even more of an imperative for him now because he’s working under a new policy of stop and frisk where he can no longer use that tack. Also, he’s claiming with de Blasio that crime will go down without abusing that tactic.”
Nineteen supervisors at the 40th Precinct in Motthaven were slapped with disciplinary charges in July after a four-month audit by the NYPD’s Quality Assurance Division discovered that they had cooked the books in 2014 on 55 out of 1,558 crime reports.
The adjustment ultimately made it appear as if crime in the area was down 14 percent, instead of the actual 11.4 percent.

http://nypost.com/2015/10/15/lapd-altered-cases-to-conceal-crime-under-bratton/

LAPD cooked the books to conceal crime under Bratton
By Chris Perez, Shawn Cohen and Rich Calder
New York Post
October 15, 2015 | 1:10pm