Skeptics Question Findings
Call NYPD Crime Stats True-Blue

By REUVEN BLAU

While critics of the NYPD have questioned the accuracy of the department's crime statistics, a recently released New York University study concluded that its figures are precise and reliable.

RAYMOND W. KELLY: Not viewed as fudging type.

The report found that the department "has set the standard for auditing and quality control functions that ensure the accuracy of NYPD crime data." It was written by SUNY-Albany Finance Professor Robert M. Purtell and NYU Professor Dennis C. Smith, who has close ties to former Police Commissioner William J. Bratton.

Taken At Face Value?

Despite the independent findings, several police experts and journalists last week continued to charge that the NYPD is fudging its crime stats by downgrading felonies to misdemeanors and manipulating other data. They contend that the study merely analyzed numbers supplied by the department.

"The report regurgitated what the department does," said a source familiar with the paper. "It didn't do an audit on any of the actual numbers."

Mr. Purtell, who examined the stats, maintained that the department's figures were legitimate. "If there was a significant change from 2000 until today, I would have picked that up," he remarked.

JOHN F. DRISCOLL: 'Numbers checked out.'

ER Visits Tell a Tale

The report, which was first publicized by the New York Sun, concluded that the relation between petty larceny and grand larceny didn't vary much from 1987 to 2004. "The data are inconsistent with any claim the NYPD today is downgrading crime reports," the study asserted.

But Paul Moses, a journalism Professor at Brooklyn College and former city editor at Newsday, has noted that the number of lost-property reports filed with police jumped by 44 percent from 1997 to 2004. He also noted that an increasing number of people were going to the hospital to be admitted or treated for assaults in four of the last five years for which figures were available, according to a Health Department survey. But the number of NYPD-reported felony assaults kept dropping, while misdemeanor assaults remain about the same, he observed.

Paul J. Browne, the NYPD's chief spokesman, declined to comment regarding those figures.

TONY GARVEY: Kelly won't tolerate fudging.

During a phone interview last week, Mr. Purtell responded, "I can pick any run of stats in the world and I can find an abnormality." He noted that his report examined only the seven major crimes reviewed by the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.

Division Among Unions

The police unions appear to be split on the issue. Two of the three labor organizations representing supervisory titles hailed the NYU report and maintained that the crime figures are accurate. Their members - Captains and Lieutenants - are the ones held most accountable by NYPD brass, who review the numbers and carefully monitor the tactics used by supervisors.

In 2004, the union representing cops and Sergeants, however, charged that the department was fudging the figures in response to pressure to show a continued decrease in crime even as police staffing dropped. Officials at the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Sergeants' Benevolent Association have since dropped the issue, declining to discuss the matter last week.

Insiders pointed out that those unions' members are also culpable in allegedly downgrading crimes, which has played a role in the unions' decision to stop highlighting the matter. Also, questioning the city's low crime rate would likely hurt their contract bargaining positions. "If crime is down, all the more there is the argument that the members of the NYPD have done their job and deserve a raise for the work that they've done," said one labor source.

CEA: 'Numbers Legit'

"The Quality Assurance Division is doing routine audits of everybody, and the numbers are constantly coming back legit," said John F. Driscoll, president of the Captains' Endowment Association. He noted that several of his members have been punished in connection with downgrading crimes in recent years.

The NYU study detailed the two audits that the department has in place, noting that no other police force in the nation uses such systems to verify their crime figures. "Their audit procedures are, if anything, excessive," Mr. Purtell said.

The researchers examined the NYPD's Data Integrity Unit and Quality-Assurance Division. Most internal audits typically focus on identifying problems and conclude with recommendations to fix accounting practices, the report said. "The NYPD's internal-audit processes go beyond that to provide specific coding, procedural and training solutions meant to mitigate future occurrences of the problems found in their audits," the study stated.

Lieutenants' Benevolent Association President Anthony Garvey pointed out that the audits have detected supervisors doctoring crime numbers. "I think the Police Commissioner tries to set the tone that anyone who is fudging numbers is going to find themselves at the end of the disciplinary process," he remarked. "I think that's clear."

Street-Level Downgrades?

According to the study, the audits carefully check the two ways crime reporting could be manipulated. They examine how responding officers report and classify crimes as well as check to make sure supervisors are not improperly changing those categorizations.

Critics of the current crime data-gathering procedures, however, contended that most of the fudging occurs at the "scratch copy level" where cops file their initial reports. "From that point of view alone, this study is inaccurate," said one source. "[Supervisors] don't want felonies brought into the precincts. Cops used to write them up to the highest level of crime and then it was up to the District Attorney's Office to knock it down. Now it's the complete opposite."

Notably, the NYU report's findings come after the head of the Commission to Combat Police Corruption abruptly resigned in June 2005 shortly after testifying before the City Council that the department's failure to provide specific crime reporting data had minimized the panel's effectiveness and delayed its investigations.

Wanted Files Subpoenaed

Mark F. Pomerantz charged that the NYPD blocked his commission from examining the integrity of the agency's crime statistics. He asked the Council to grant the commission subpoena power to help it obtain the crime figures and other NYPD documents.

"He left to work in a law firm," Mr. Browne responded last week. Mr. Pomerantz is a former Federal prosecutor and a partner with the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.

The little-known oversight agency has since pared staff, with its commanding officer, Julie Block, transferring to the Department of Investigation in September. New Commissioner Michael F. Armstrong has called off all department reviews while the Law Department examines the commission's jurisdiction.

Mr. Browne has maintained that the NYPD has given the panel access to all records involving possible corruption.

Mr. Moses, who has written several articles on the crime reporting issue for the Village Voice, renewed his call for an outside agency to examine the figures. "I don't think this report is the independent investigation that is needed," he said in an e-mail, referring the NYU study. "And the NYPD brass will go to great lengths to prevent that from happening."

5% Margin of Error

The report cited Mr. Moses's Voice articles, and called them "the most extensive treatment of a charge of crime-report fudging in New York City." But the study also noted that in 2000 the Comptroller's Office reviewed the crime stats and concluded "CompStat did not misreport crimes by more than 4.9 percent."

Mr. Moses and others pointed out that the pressure to misreport crimes has since greatly increased. "It seemed to me that when the cops themselves say the crime reports are cooked, that is worth looking into," he said. "My article didn't say that there had never been an audit, just that there hadn't been any response to the police unions' charges."

The NYU study noted that during the 1970s and '80s, most criminologists and law-enforcement experts believed that crime was a sociological and not a police issue. That thinking meant that crime rates were a "relatively unimportant measure of police effectiveness," the paper said. But since the 1990s, police forces with an increased focus on crime rates have used such stats to evaluate their own effectiveness. In the middle of that decade, the NYPD introduced COMPSTAT, which rates supervisors' performance based on computerized statistical models. That system also enables the department to distribute resources to high-crime areas to address problems in a district.

'Robust Quality Controls'

According to the NYU report, under CompStat and the department's auditing procedures, the "NYPD maintains the most robust and systematic quality control practices in use."

Everyone agrees that in the early years of CompStat, crime dropped dramatically. "There has been an almost unbelievable reduction in crime in the city, but in fact that's what has happened," said Eugene O'Donnell, a Professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The NYPD's crime stats have attracted attention. Proving to be an exception to a recent nationwide increase in violent crime, rapes and assaults in the city have continued to drop. The Bloomberg administration has routinely cited Federal crime statistics to bolster its claim that New York City is the safest large city in America.

According to the FBI's preliminary Uniform Crime Report released in June, the city experienced a 4.3-percent drop in overall crime last year. Since Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly took over the department in 2002, the city's overall crime rate has declined by 17.7 percent.

Defies National Trend

The number of homicides nationwide rose 2.1 percent last year, with the greatest increase, 4.9 percent, in the Midwest. It was the first such hike in four years.

In New York City, FBI figures show, violent crime continued to drop, falling 1.9 percent, while property crime fell 5.1 percent, compared with a national decline of 1.6 percent.

Homicides, however, increased from 537 in Fiscal Year 2005 to 564 in FY 2006. Mayor Bloomberg downplayed that rise by noting that for the fourth consecutive year there were fewer than 600 murders in the city. But critics of the department have questioned the assault and larceny statistics and have noted the FBI merely takes the figures the NYPD supplies. "Inevitably, when something as dramatic and unexpected as the New York City crime reduction story is told, some skeptics and cynics pose alternative explanations," the NYU report stated. "One is that since the police control crime reporting, perhaps the numbers cannot be trusted."

Shortly after Mr. Bloomberg was first elected five years ago, many claimed the novice politician and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly would never be able to keep reducing crime.

Looking for Bodies

"Reporters all over the city are waiting to write a crime story that says that there is scandalous book-cooking and that the crime rate is about to skyrocket," Professor O'Donnell said during a Nov. 1 phone interview. "There is no evidence to support either assertion; both are demonstrably not true."

Mr. Moses and others, however, have urged the department to release the "mass of crime complaint data on its computer for all charges ... and not just 'index' crimes." Without that information and some additional files, he said, it is difficult to know whether or not crime stats have been doctored.

"Figures can be manipulated," said an insider, who asked to remain anonymous. "You can reclassify things. You can take a burglary and make it a trespass, and that's where the concern comes in."