The Los Angeles Police Department continued to struggle in accurately classifying serious assaults last year, according to an audit released Tuesday.
The audit comes after a Times investigation last year revealed that the department had routinely misclassified serious assaults as minor offenses that weren't counted in the city's crime rate.
The new review examined one crime category: aggravated assault. Based on sampling done by auditors, officials estimate that there were actually 23% more aggravated assaults in 2014 than the LAPD originally reported.
Big cities tend to be one-party jurisdictions, and the people running them have a strong incentive to cook the books to support the narrative convenient to their interest groups. In California, those would include the (very flush) backers of Prop 47. Although they have had only limited success in covering up how much a crime disaster Prop 47 has been, they don't want the reported damage (and hence the push for repeal) to get any worse than it is now. Hence the cooked crime statistics (not that this is the only reason -- garden variety deceit and bureaucratic self-interest haven't gone away, either).
As the push for more widespread "sentencing reform" grows, I guarantee this will not be the last set of cooked figures we see, designed to have a lulling effect about the true incidence of rising crime.
I think this is far more widespread than is recognized. First Chicago, which actually made murders disappear, and now LAPD. I have personal knowledge of another major urban police agency which on a regular basis turned all sorts of felonies into misdemeanors, or in the parlance of the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR's), turned Part 1 crimes into Part 2 crimes. So, burglaries were downgraded to trespasses, grand theft reduced to petit theft, aggravated assault to simple assault ala LAPD, and so on.
Grand theft (auto & firearms) reports were unfounded and not reported at all by requiring an after-the-fact affidavit of prosecution from ostensible victims, which often went to the wrong address or which were not returned in a timely manner.
Anyway, as I have posted before, especially when referring to urban areas which have or had fairly high crime rates in the past, current reporting should always be considered with some prejudice, Both appointed and elected officials see reductions as necessities for continued job tenure. Within an agency which has adopted the so-called NYPD-style CompStat accountability, any crime reporting is likewise suspect, since usually the person generating the reports is the same person accountable for any rise or fall in the numbers and so has a motive to jiggle them.
JCC
Are you suggesting that the police cannot be trusted because they cover up crimes to serve their own interests and to hurt the public they are supposed to protect?
And isn't this essentially what we keep hearing from the Black Lives Matter Movement?
Color me confused and unsure who I am supposed to trust and believe.
1. Comments that begin, "Are you suggesting..." are always an attempt to put words in my mouth, so I generally just move along. I tend to be fairly direct, and if I want to say something, I won't use suggestion. I'll say it outright.
2. No, what we hear from BLM are fabrications that a crime did happen (Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown) when in fact it did not happen. I also hear, "Pigs in blankets, fry 'em like bacon." Very highbrow stuff.
It's not so much that BLM distrusts the cops. It's that it thinks, falsely and often maliciously, that the cops are a racist occupying army.
3. I of course have no portfolio to tell you or anyone whom to believe or trust, but if I had such a portfolio, I would point a finger of skepticism at an institution other than the police. http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2015/08/next-time-you-get-lectured-abo.html
@ D Berman -
I suspect you are deliberately misunderstanding what I wrote.
What I said was that police agencies and police administrators, in concert with elected officials, can and will manipulate and falsify crime reporting in a way that minimizes actual crime data. This is, generally, for job protection for agency heads and elected officials, as the voting public sees crime as a significant voting issue. I would also suggest that this occurs mainly in large, urban areas with high crime rates. These efforts actually work against the interests of both public and agency rank and file. I would also say that the agency rank and file oppose these efforts as best they can.
What we are hearing from the BLM movements, to the degree there is a coherent voice, is that the cops are routinely murdering black people and covering this up, and routinely violating the rights of black people and also covering that up. I suggest that, IMO, this somehow ignores the systematic long-time issues within the black community that breeds such high crime and violence, independent of policing tactics or police composition.
Are you honestly suggesting there is the least bit of symmetry here?
BTW, I will agree that you are terribly confused on both issues.
@ D Berman -
Sorry, I should not have added that last line. An underserved cheap shot.
JCC
I hope that both Bill and JCC understand that I was not truly trying to equate their concerns with police agencies and police administrators manipulating and falsifying crime statistics by with concerns stressed by the BLM movement.
But I did intend to spotlight that libertarians like me see a very common theme in both sets of concerns --- namely a recognition and a complaint that the police (both rank & file and their bosses) often operate like many other government agents who, when their actions are closely scrutinized, are often revealed to be more interested in making government growth/power "look good" than in actually ensuring government growth/power is really best serving the people footing the bill for all that government.