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 vn police departments to show everdecreasing 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 sinee 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 lilee vandalism, which are not reported to the bureau.
As less serious crimes, they do not show up on a city's crime reports
published by the

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
underreported 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.