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"