By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
July 28, 2014
Yes, it’s true, though these are not the ectoplasmic spirits of movies and TV. These are inventions of local police commanders who are falsifying records in the same sort of way that CompStat was being tweaked, to make things look better than they actually are.
Assuming the LA TIMES piece is correct, what is going on is that the local commanders are listing ghost cars as being on patrol, when in fact they are not, to ensure that their on-patrol stats are up to snuff. Since these are tracked by computer you can’t just invent them from whole cloth, so they use real cops who are on their days off or in the station doing paperwork and show them as being out on patrol in real cars that are in fact in the garage and not out patrolling. This is a way of making it look as though the local commanders are doing their job by getting a required number of cops out on patrol when that is in fact not happening.
The LA police union has forwarded complaints along these lines to the Inspector General who is said to be actively investigating the case.
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