The Village Voice, one of the best newspapers in the country, has an article confirming an earlier investigation they had done about massive manipulation of crime statistics by the NYPD. In short, they pumped up the number of arrests of people committing minor crimes at most (and often no crimes at all) and simultaneously kept arrests for serious crimes at a minimum. It’s all based on a whistleblowing officer who recorded his superiors repeatedly telling officers to do both of those things.
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.
Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
And guess what the NYPD did in response to this?
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft’s superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
But now the Voice has an internal police investigative report that confirmed all of Schoolcraft’s allegations:
In the wake of our series, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly ordered an investigation into Schoolcraft’s claims. By June 2010, that investigation produced a report that the department has tried to keep secret for nearly two years.
The Voice has obtained that 95-page report, and it shows that the NYPD confirmed Schoolcraft’s allegations. In other words, at the same time that police officials were attacking Schoolcraft’s credibility, refusing to pay him, and serving him with administrative charges, the NYPD was sitting on a document that thoroughly vindicated his claims.
Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft’s specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.
These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.
“When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications,” investigators concluded. “This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.” …
The investigation found that crime complaints were changed to reflect misdemeanor rather than felony crimes, which prevented those incidents from being counted in the all-important crime statistics. In addition, the investigation concluded that “an unwillingness to prepare reports for index crimes exists or existed in the command.”
Moreover, a significant number of serious index crimes were not entered into the computer tracking system known as OmniForm. “This was more than administrative error,” the probe concluded.
There was an “atmosphere in the command where index crimes were scrutinized to the point where it became easier to either not take the report at all or to take a report for a lesser, non-index crime,” investigators concluded.
We’ve heard a lot of claims about how New York’s crime rate had gone down so far during the Giuliani administration because he had put all the focus on constantly stopping people and handling all the minor little crimes, which supposedly then sent this message to criminals that they would get caught and that subsequently made them less likely to do something wrong. But it appears that this may have far more to do with dishonest manipulation of the system than with actually preventing crime.
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slc1
March 21, 2012 at 1:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
We’ve heard a lot of claims about how New York’s crime rate had gone down so far during the Giuliani administration because he had put all the focus on constantly stopping people and handling all the minor little crimes, which supposedly then sent this message to criminals that they would get caught and that subsequently made them less likely to do something wrong. But it appears that this may have far more to do with dishonest manipulation of the system than with actually preventing crime.
A little caution is required here. Apparently, this entire scandal involved 1 precinct in the city. Was any evidence collected that indicated that the practice was wide spread?
Pteryxx
March 21, 2012 at 1:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Considering that this one whistleblower was shoved into a psychiatric hospital and subjected to trumped-up charges while the district concealed the evidence? You’re asking an awful lot of anyone who might have access to more information.
Besides, there’s reason to think the underlying cause IS widespread:
and
alanb
March 21, 2012 at 1:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Was any evidence collected that indicated that the practice was wide spread?
Although the Village Voice article focuses mostly on the 81st, it includes the following:
jayhawk
March 21, 2012 at 2:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Pteryxx, any thought on why no one else has come forward with allegations . . . never mind.
mikeym
March 21, 2012 at 2:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This compelling story was the subject of an excellent episode of This American Life:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent
rabbitscribe
March 21, 2012 at 3:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh good- I don’t have to hunt down the TAM link. Thanks Mikeym, and yeah, the episode is absolutely worth anyone’s time.
Lou Doench
March 21, 2012 at 3:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, I heard this on TAL last year I think. That dude Schoolcraft has major league balls and deserves a fucking medal for what he went through.
Zugswang
March 21, 2012 at 5:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Anyone else reminded of Frank Serpico right now?
The real shame is, after all the work he did over 40 years ago, it seems that very little has really changed.
caseloweraz
March 21, 2012 at 5:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Serpico, sure… and now Schoolcraft. It seems the New York City police department should hire more officers whose last names start with “S”.
organon
March 21, 2012 at 8:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Again! How many instances of corruption have to be made public before these things start being seen as a problem and acted on? Why be concerned with that I suppose. The important issues have to be tackled. Outlaw contraception. Force kids to pray mandated prayers to a mandated superstition. Limit rights to “real” americans. Restore women to their place as second class citizens. Make the nations laws comport with interpretations of biblical law. Clean the schools of evil teaching…such as theories like “evolution.” Teach real history(ala David Barton). Silence anyone with views counter to the officially sanctioned views of “real” Americans. Death penalty for simple drugs…but not oxycontin. Stop playing pacifists and go to war for real. Turn our underfunded military into one funded like a respectable christian nation. Limit public office, public positions, and public support, to the select segment to whom rights are actually intended. Remove that muslim (_____) from the White House. Restore McCarthyism. What’s police corruption when there’s an endless list of real issues to be tackled?
Marcus Ranum
March 22, 2012 at 12:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, but they had the time to shut down Occupy Wall St. So, they’re obviously “on the job” for their corporate masters.
left0ver1under
March 22, 2012 at 12:39 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
They put the whistleblower in a mental hospital? It wouldn’t surprise me if it weren’t only done to discredit him, but to abuse him just as the Soviets used to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry
Ace of Sevens
March 22, 2012 at 9:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
When I took intro to criminal justice a few years ago, my prof was a former small-town police chief. One of his main complaints about the crime-stat tracking system is it basically encouraged cooking the books rather than stopping crime, which lead to worse outcomes since you can’t properly deal with a crime you’re trying to pretend doesn’t exist.