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They missed a theory: fudging the stats and failing to report crimes. Excerpt from an interview with David Simon: ----- They [the police department in Baltimo
by chlodwig 11y ago
They missed a theory: fudging the stats and failing to report crimes. Excerpt from an interview with David Simon:
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They [the police department in Baltimore] cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...
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- __z 11y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/perceptions-havent-caught-up-to-decline-in-crime.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/perceptions-havent-... "These trends aren’t caused by changes in our willingness to report crime to the police. We see an even more significant decline in violent crime in data derived from surveys asking people whether they’ve been the victims of certain crimes over the past year. The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault. This survey has nothing to say about the decline in homicide, for obvious reasons."
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoDavid Simon says that homicide is the hardest crime stat to fudge, since there's a body and the different rate changes between homicide and other crimes is actually used to try to measure how much the stats are being fudged.
- Kesty 11y agoYou can always report an homicide as a suicide. You will have an increase suicide rate, but it won't effect the criminal rate.
- cmdkeen 11y agoExcept that's a really serious felony far and above other statistics fiddling, Baltimore at its worst didn't go that far - you're making yourself an accessory to murder after the fact. Not only would you have Federal authorities getting interested quickly but you have pesky family members raising queries about how their loved one shot themselves to death 34 times on a street corner. Even in the darkest days of Baltimore I don't think there were allegations of homicides being declared as suicides.
- anthony_d 11y agoJust to be pedantic: in it's darkest days the police in Baltimore commit murder. It's naive to think the police would never do something purely because it's really bad. I will agree that from a practical standpoint it seems far fetched to think they could get away with mislabeling homicides on any significant scale.
- CPLX 11y agoYou can sometimes report a homicide as a suicide. Not very often, given things like the relative unpopularity of multiple gunshot wounds from a moving car as a suicide method, and so on.
- __z 11y agoI have no data for this (other than watching TV) but reporting homicide as suicide is probably more likely due to incompetence rather than malice.
- kabouseng 11y agoAnd if the victim has life insurance, reporting a homicide as a suicide has insurance consequences, the family would provide resistance to.
- huxley 11y agoDavid Simon is talking about one particular administration, he later says in the same interview: "And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that’s when Baltimore makes some progress."
- bsbechtel 11y agoI've heard of this being done in Chicago as well.
- Shivetya 11y agoWell rape numbers are not as high as they should be, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta isn't reporting them even at times when patients request it, either from misunderstanding new privacy laws in medical records or because of the rules. http://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/fulton-rapes-go-unreported/nmcGb/ http://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/fulton-rapes-go-unrep...
- mortenjorck 11y agoChicago Magazine had a big two-part investigative report into a similar pattern in the CPD: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/ http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-...
- slipjack 11y agoWould you expect that amount of fudging to change over time? Arguing that fudging stats explains the drop in crime requires that you believe in the last 30 years police throughout the country have started undercounting the amount of crime in their areas by increasing amounts year after year.