Over the years I’ve come to distrust those crime statistics released by cities showing a reduction in their crime rate. I’m convinced that those stats are manipulated to make a city and its police department look better than they deserve. In Houston several obvious murders have been classified as ‘suicide’ even though the deceased had been shot multiple times in each case. However, most of the manipulation involves classifying cases as misdemeanors that should have been reported as felonies.
Last month, The New York Times reported ‘a dip in crime’ based on stats released by NYPD. John Eterno, a former NYPD captain and now associate dean at Molloy College, and Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, responded to the Times with the following letter:
LETTER
New York Crime Statistics
The New York Times
December 3, 2010
To the Editor:
As the authors of the academic survey referred to in “As Police Point to a Dip in Crime, Murders and Robberies Are Up” (news article, Nov. 26), we applaud the article’s attempt to bring crime statistics to the forefront. Our published peer-reviewed journal articles clearly demonstrate the manipulation of crime statistics by New York Police Department.
Audiotapes made by Police Department officers document police instructions to downgrade major crimes to the lesser charge of misdemeanor crimes (which are not part of the public crime count), for the purpose of lowering official crime statistics.
According to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, New York City’s misdemeanor crimes skyrocketed from 1996 to 2001 — further evidence of pushing major crimes into the misdemeanor crime category. This revelation confirms our research as well as the Police Department’s failure to report these misdemeanor crimes since 2002, the first year of Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s return to office.
On top of this, hospital admissions data for assaults show a trend completely at variance with the Police Department’s public data. They indicate that firearms assaults more than doubled from 1999 to 2005.
Your article says, “Without a substantial decrease in grand larcenies this year, however, the city would show an increase in overall crime.” Since grand larcenies are among the easiest crimes to downgrade to a misdemeanor, this suggests further confirmation of manipulation by the Police Department.
One way to conclusively resolve this issue is for the Police Department to allow scrutiny from outside agencies. The time is ripe for Police Department transparency.
John A. Eterno
Eli B. Silverman
Rockville Centre, N.Y., Nov. 26, 2010
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