POLICE IN ABOUT-FACE ON CITY CRIME DATA

NYPD To Post Misdemeanor Statistics For Past 10 Years In Response To
Allegations That Serious Offenses Were Downgraded

The New York Police Department on Monday begins posting data on
citywide misdemeanor crime complaints dating back 10 years, partly in
response to claims that withholding such statistics indicated it had
something to hide, officials said.

Academicians and journalists suspicious of the veracity of the NYPD's
long-shrinking total of "index crimes"-murders, rapes, robberies,
felony assaults, grand larcenies, burglaries and auto thefts-have
theorized that the police department is downgrading many of these
serious crimes into misdemeanors and thereby artificially dropping the
city's crime rate. The index-crime rate for 2010 is expected to
register a decline for the 22nd consecutive year.

Some downgrading theorists felt their case was bolstered by the NYPD's
2003 decision to stop forwarding its misdemeanor-crime statistics to
the state's Division of Criminal Justice Service, which annually
compiles and publishes statewide crime statistics. News reports and
some criminologists have questioned why the NYPD is one of only two
police departments in the state not to provide the misdemeanor
complaints to the DCJS.

NYPD officials have said the statistics were not forwarded because a
new computer system was not compatible with the DCJS's system.

"We have been unfairly and falsely accused of trying to hide the ball,
so it was decided that the easiest way to deal with those falsehoods
was to put it all up on the website," Paul Browne, the NYPD's
spokesman, said.

The Wall Street Journal asked a professor whose research has supported
the accuracy of the NYPD's statistics and one whose research purported
the opposite to review some of the misdemeanor complaints released by
the police. Both said there were no obvious trends to indicate that
index crimes were being downgraded into misdemeanors.

That does not mean, however, that the two educators-Dennis Smith, an
associate professor of public policy at New York University's Wagner
Graduate School of Public Service, and Eli Silverman, professor
emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate
Center of City University of New York-are now on the same page.

"To be looking at a 10-year display of data across a range of crimes,
if there was this concerted effort of downgrading crimes then it would
have to show up in some kind of pattern," said Mr. Smith, who
conducted a study on grand-larceny versus petite-larceny complaints
and found no statistical deviation. "And there is no pattern here."

Mr. Silverman, who co-authored a study released in February that
challenged the accuracy of the NYPD's statistics, said that without an
independent agency verifying the misdemeanor statistics there's no way
of being assured the complaints are accurate.

"The fundamental problem is the recording of the crime in the first
place," Mr. Silverman said. "Until there is complete transparency and
an audit by an outside agency then the police are going to continue to
selectively leak out information when they feel like doing
it....Without an independent audit, what do we have? Just their word."

The professors were asked by the Journal to analyze a year-by-year
breakdown of the four crimes that historically have been believed to
be the easiest to manipulate-grand larcenies, felony assaults,
burglaries and rapes-and compare them with a breakdown of the lesser
crimes that they would likely be downgraded to if manipulation were
happening: petite larceny, misdemeanor assaults, trespassing and other
felony and/or misdemeanor sex crimes.

For example, an officer who wanted to hide a grand larceny, which is
counted as an index crime and as such would affect the city's crime
rate, could classify the crime as a petite larceny, a statistic that
is not counted as part of the official crime rate. If that type of
manipulation were taking place, some pattern of increase for petite
larcenies over the years should, theoretically, accompany the decrease
in grand larcenies, Mr. Smith said.

The professors, who have been at opposite ends of the NYPD
crime-statistics debate, were given the breakdown for the years 2000
through 2009.

Between 2003-the year that NYPD's data ceased being forwarded to the
DCJS-and the end of 2009, grand larcenies decreased by 17.27% and
petite larcenies fell 5.73%. Felony assaults decreased by 12.46% and
misdemeanor assaults also dropped, by 2.22%. Misdemeanor sexual
assaults were up 9.32%, but rapes were down 47.68%. Felony sexual
assaults, which aren't counted as part of the city's crime rate, were
down 41.31%.

The decrease in burglaries, by 33.33%, tracks closely to the increase
in criminal trespassing, which was up 32.33%. Although the numbers
match the type of pattern expected if serious crimes were being
downgraded to lesser ones, unlike petite larceny, misdemeanor assaults
or the lesser sex crimes other than rape, criminal trespassing is not
the only alternative to a burglary charge.

In fact, Mr. Browne said the rise in trespassing complaints is due to
increased participation in a program under which landlords agree to be
complainants in all cases brought against anyone accused of being on
their properties illegally. Thus, police don't have to get individual
complaints from landlords each time they want to make an arrest. Also,
the NYPD has in recent years increased patrols of housing projects and
stepped up, in general, quality-of-life enforcement, moves that have
led to an increase in criminal-trespassing complaints, he said.

Overall, misdemeanor complaints increased by 4.26% between 2003 and
2009, while the index crimes dropped by 28.20%. However, unlike almost
all felonies, many misdemeanors complaints are generated by police
activity. Increased enforcement against drug dealing, for example,
creates a spike in complaints that would not exist if police weren't
making arrests. The same cannot be said for the index crimes.

Between 2003 and 2009, misdemeanor arrests increased by 29.28%. More
than half of that increase is accounted for by large spikes in arrests
in trespassing and drug cases, two so-called victimless crimes that
drive up the complaint total, according to the NYPD's recently
released statistics.

Mr. Silverman said he believes the NYPD's "Compstat" system for
tracking crime, under which police commanders are held accountable for
spikes in their precincts, has led to statistics being manipulated to
avoid increases.

He said the NYPD's misdemeanor statistics don't jibe with studies such
as his and others that call into question the accuracy of the NYPD's
crime statistics or instances in which it has been shown that crime
reports have been manipulated or ignored. As proof that statistical
manipulation has occurred, Mr. Silverman pointed to the case of
Brooklyn police officer Adrian Schoolcraft, whose secretly recorded
audiotapes led to several officers and a precinct commander being
charged in October for failing to take a crime report.

"It stretches the credibility beyond the breaking point," he said of
the misdemeanor complaints. "What is needed is a complete accounting
from someone else, someone independent, outside the agency to actually
examine it."

The New York Times last week reported that it had filed a lawsuit
claiming the police department has not complied with the state's
Freedom of Information Law in dealing with several of the newspaper's
information requests for the data.

Mr. Smith said those who believe the NYPD systematically downgrades
crimes fail to address that the police department uses its crime
statistics to deploy officers to where the crime is happening. Getting
this information accurate is so important to the NYPD, he said, that
it has two separate units responsible for making sure that the crime
statistics are accurate.

"The police department recognizes that they have to be serious about
the quality of their data to make decisions and to achieve their
mission," Mr. Smith said. Mr. Smith said the NYPD relies on accurate
statistics to deploy its officers to crime hot spots. "To fudge crime
reports would just be putting salt in their own eyes."