STATISTICS:THE PRESSURE IS ON FOR POLICE DEPARTMENTS TO SHOW REDUCED
CRIME RATES.

Philadelphia-senior police officials around the nation are concerned
that the 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
manipulated crime data.

So far this year, there have been charges of falsely reporting crime
statistics in Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta and Boca Raton, Fla.,
resulting in the resignations or demotions of highranking police commanders.

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, the media and the public
should attach so much importance to the annual, and sometimes monthly,
release of the latest crime figures.

Philadelphia had to withdraw its crime figures from the national
system maintained by the FBI for 1996, 1997 and for at least the first
half of 1998 because of the under reporting and downgrading serious
crimes.

Gil Kerlikowske, the former police commissioner of Buffalo, N.Y., said
the pressure on police departments to prove their performance through
reduced crime figures, with promotions and pay raises increasingly
dependent of good data, "creates a new area for police corruption and
ethics."

Kerlikowske suggested that there had been to 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," Kerlikowske 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 to misdemeanors, which are not reported to
the FBI.

Philadelphia's new police commissioner, John Timoney, discovered last
month that the youngest district commander in his city, Capt. Daniel
Castro, had greatly exaggerated his reports of crime reduction.

Castro reported an 80 percent drop in serious crime in his district
over the past year. But a review found that Castro had downgraded many
robberies,. burglaries and thefts to cases of "missing property."
Castro was removed from his command.

In the past, police officers in many cities had not attached much
importance to collecting crime statistics beyond the need to report
them to FBI, Timoney said.

This casual attitude toward statistics, he said, also stemmed from a
"belief by the average police chief, in their heart of hearts, that
they couldn't do anything about crime because they couldn't affect the
root causes of crime." This was an idea that had been popularized by
academic criminologists in the 1970s and 1980s.

The success of New York in significantly reducing crime, along with
similar successes in cities from Boston to Houston, changed that
old-fashioned mind-set, Timoney said. Statistics have now became as
important a tool to the police as good accounting is the corporate
executives.

Checked-by: "Don Beck"