The practice of manufacturing artificially low crime rates increased substantially after 2002 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner Raymond Kelly. New research based on interviews with 2,000 retired police officers from the NYPD reveals pervasive, system-wide corruption of criminal records and police practices. This research suggests that concern with the department's reputation for reducing crime, much more than with public safety, drives police policy.
Mountains of scientific evidence supporting this are explored in The Crime Numbers Game. The bulk of the book's evidence came from a survey of 500 retired police officers ranked captain and above, as well as from in depth interviews with over 40 retired and active officers.
A new survey of former NYPD officers includes 10 police chiefs, 36 inspectors, 63 captains, 262 lieutenants, 382 sergeants, and 1,154 patrol officers and detectives. The survey asked officers if they had witnessed words being changed in crime reports or observed other unethical efforts to downgrade serious crimes to lesser offenses. Using the officers who retired before 1995 as a baseline, the survey found that 25 percent of those officers had personally observed unethical crime reporting. Only 28 percent of those who retired between 1995 and 2001 had observed these activities.
However, in the Kelly/Bloomberg era (2002 and after) over half the officers -- 51 percent -- had observed the intentional misclassification of serious crimes as petty offenses and other unethical practices, typically multiple times. Officers also reported that since 2002 they had experienced unusually strong pressures from supervisors to downgrade crimes and keep crime numbers low.
Hello? Chicago Media?
CompStat again under fire in New York. This is hard research backed up by facts, figures, papers, surveys, etc., but Rahm won't let the media touch it. The Huffington Post isn't controlled by Rahm though: