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General News    H2'ed 2/7/10

NYPD Cops Fudged Crime Stats in Compstat Model Program Now Used in 100s of US Cities

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There's something very big here.If you look at the repercussions, this stats program does for police what the Leave No Child Behind program for schools does to teachers-- encourages them to shape the data. In this case, it may be putting us all at risk by fudging crime stats.

A new survey of over 100 retired NYPD captains and senior officers found that they believed that statistics were manipulated to portray lower crime rates for the compstat program that calculates crime rates..

The survey suggests that police have distorted crime reporting, dropping value of stolen goods so the theft is categorized as misdemeanor instead of felony. They drop categorization of crimes from felony to misdemeanor if suspects can't be found.

One element of the compsat program is the theory that aggressive arrests for the smallest crimes, with a minimum of 24 hours spent in jail, lead to discouraging of repeat offenses.

Compsat, originally adopted by Rudy Giuliani's first police chief, William J. Bratton, is now in use by hundreds of police departments all over the US and the world, including LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Houston, Baltimore and Vancouver. Many former NYPD officers now operate as consultants to those cities, helping them run the compsat program.

The survey raises the question as to whether the use of this system literally encourages police and district attorneys to manipulate crime reporting.

The NY Times, in an article title, Retired Officers Raise Questions on Crime Data, reported,
"

In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies -- felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat -- to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.

Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.

"Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics," said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain."
And an article in the NY Post, titled, NYPD stats were captain cooked reports:

But a growing chorus of complaints -- including those from Post interviews with dozens of officers and a new survey of retired captains -- allege that the pressure of CompStat leads precinct bosses to downgrade major crimes to minor offenses.

The evidence includes:


* A new survey of 491 retired captains that found that respondents who worked in the CompStat era felt greater pressure from management to doctor major crimes.

* The NYPD Staten Island Evidence Collection Team's fingerprinting of burglary scenes but not entering its findings if cops did not issue the victims a police report. The burglaries would then not appear on CompStat.

* Sergeants' different attitude during roll call once CompStat began. Before, they would instruct officers to report all crimes. When CompStat came aboard, that speech disappeared.

* Officers who purposely made it difficult for victims to file complaints. Cops responding to burglaries would ask for serial numbers and receipts for lost items and not file their reports until those had been produced.

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

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He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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