When Is a Crime Not a Crime? (Urban PDs Have Been Cooking the Crime Stats)

StLtoday.com (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) ^ | January 15, 2005 | Jeremy Kohler

[litany_of_lies]

When is a Crime Not a Crime?

By Jeremy Kohler


Somebody is robbed in the city of St. Louis every three hours, on average. At least, that is what the official crime statistics suggest.

Danielle Geekie's time came on a cold night last January, as she walked along South Broadway. She said the gunman called her lucky. A crazy notion, but true enough. He took her purse, but not her life. She ran into a liquor store and pleaded for help as he sped off in a maroon car.

Geekie, then 19, was a crime victim as defined by the FBI. She was a crime victim as defined by the St. Louis Police Department's policy. But the officers who responded the night of Jan. 12, 2004, decided otherwise and quietly invoked a process that arbitrarily discounted hundreds or more crime reports a year.

Instead of writing an "incident report" that triggers further investigation and gets counted in the city's crime totals, the officers opted for a "Crime Memo Data Sheet" that generally languishes in a file drawer of a district station.

It is a mechanism secret enough that a Police Board member who was tipped off about it tried to find it and came away convinced it didn't exist.

A Post-Dispatch investigation found the memos do exist. One effect is to deprive Geekie and unknown others of further investigations and deny them proof they ever reported crimes.

While the use of memos does not appear to be illegal, it clearly violates FBI standards for reporting crimes in a national compilation widely used for comparisons among cities. The effect makes St. Louis appear safer than it is....


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[litany_of_lies]

Well, well....cooking the crime books so cities look safer. Who woulda thunk it? (/sarcasm)

And how surprised should we be that Philly, which goes to so much trouble to charge peaceful Christians with hate crimes, is a chronic underrporter?

Or that Hotlanta cooked to the books to look good for the Olympics?

Or that the beginnings of crime underreporting appear to trace their origins to the mid-late 90s, when you-know-who was running the country?

[cake_crumb]

I'd say Philly underreports crimes perpetrated by non whites while ALSO overreporting white "hate crimes"

[secretagent]

I wonder if this comes from cities wanting to have higher "desireable" rankings.

[eno_]

It would literally be better to shut down most big-city PDs and start from scratch. They are corrupt through and through.

[Terriergal]

When is a Crime Not a Crime?

When it's committed by a liberal. Next question?

[econ_grad]

Police Depts are the biggest reason why we can't have a sensible drug policy in this country. Cops are in the forefront of the prohibition policy.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

The corruption in law enforcement in Atlanta is rivaled by what's happening in surrounding jurisdictions. I have seen the operation of some of the Fulton County Sheriff's Department - and that has been incredibly corrupt [Dekalb County is right up there too.] There has been a new Fulton Co. Sheriff in place for a short time and it is not yet clear whether he will get a handle on cleaning up the corruption. Much of what has happened in the area is spillover from the City of Atlanta.

[Terriergal]

corrupt=liberal

at least in the modern day definiton.

[Enterprise]

Yeah, but what's anyone going to do about it? Suppose most of the Police Departments do this type of nonsense to reflect "lower" crime rates, who you gonna call? The Police? The FBI? C'mon, gimme a break. As other posters will note, the corruption across the length and breadth of this land is profound. Just pray you are not a genuine victim.

[FreedomCalls]

To be perfectly fair. The one example they give is probably not a crime. I side with the police on this one. Not everyone who reports a crime is telling the truth.

One was Geekie, who said she missed a bus the night she was robbed and was hurrying to the women's shelter where she was staying, trying to beat a curfew.

Officer Joyce Wesley answered the holdup call. "I believed that Geekie was attempting to get a police report to justify her late arrival to the shelter," Wesley wrote in a memo. "She appeared to be more concerned about being late than being robbed."

There was no proof Geekie was lying. There was no witness to contradict the story, no surveillance video. Just the word of a shaken teen facing the prospect of a midwinter night on the street.

Judging from the last sentence there, even the reporter is skeptical about "Geekie's" story.

[litany_of_lies]

Your point is valid about this particular instance, which makes one wonder why this incident was used as the poster child for the article's theme. Hard to tell. In general, the reporter doesn't seem to be sympathetic to keeping crimes off the books by writing memos and storing them in a secret place.

The larger point is that cops in a lot of towns are fudging the truth about crime because of perceived or real pressure from City Hall in the (probably vain) hope that they can "arrest" (so to speak) middle-class flight to the burbs and exurbs.

I've always thought people relied a bit too much on the anecdotal when deciding a place wasn't safe. Now I have to wonder if that's the only thing left to go by.

[ccmay]

Cops are in the forefront of the prohibition policy.

Jobs for the boys.

It's tearing the country apart just like it did in the days of Al Capone.

-ccm

[FreedomCalls]

Your point is valid about this particular instance, which makes one wonder why this incident was used as the poster child for the article's theme.

Because today's reporters go out and try to find facts that fit their preconceived notion of what they are going to write (or push -- since reporters no longer report the facts as they find them, instead they push an issue, viewpoint, or talking point). In this case, the facts didn't fit his story. But he went with it anyway -- he "Maped" it. "Never let a fact get in the way of a good story." This was probably the best one he had. Maybe the others were even more obviously fake.