Police recording of crime: mandated productivity

[ganulv]

Moderator's Note

This thread's title was 'Ah, mandated productivity (former NYPD detective makes corruption allegations' until today (25th May 2014), as it covers beyond New York it has been amended to 'Police recording of crime: mandated productivity' (ends).

We fabricated drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas, former detective testifies | NYDailyNews.com

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.


The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.


Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_c...#ixzz1arFzbXwc

[Fuchs]

Coincidentally, I saw just today a video in which observers discussed how NYPD had arrested Wall Street protesters under false charges, saying that a NYPD Lt arrived and told them he saw them doing this, that, that - and they replied to him that he wasn't even present before the arrest.

[Ken White]

What a surprise!

People. They just will not do what we think they should...

News reports (with some credibility) keeping people honest have always been helpful. The world goes on.

[ganulv]

I had a job for a year or so that had me at the local cop shop often enough to lead me to the conclusion that law enforcement is a damn thankless line of work. Whenever my friends and family bitch about cops I tell them to think of a police officer like a snake—they’ve got more reason to be scared of a stranger than vice versa.

Stories like this don’t help me make my case, though.

[carl]

What a surprise!

Individual officers behaving badly is one thing, a culture of corruption fostered by department policy is another thing altogether.

Ganulv: The way I like to think of officers is that they are just citizens who concentrate on an area of any citizen's responsibility more than the other guys. They have no more rights than the other guy, but they do have higher standards they must fulfill.

[Ken White]

Individual officers behaving badly is one thing, a culture of corruption fostered by department policy is another thing altogether.

I assume that groupings of Officers behaving badly due to an unofficial, against policy but still collaborative protective or supportive effect is something else again.

They are people, just like the rest of us. The neat thing is they get do things when confronted with any efforts aimed at or inadvertently responsible for POP.

[davidbfpo]

Mandated productivity

What a delightful term. There is a large gulf between fabricated evidence and an individual officer's decision to exercise discretion. In my experience 'mandated productivity', in the UK known as 'Performance Indicators', meant arrests were made and discretion was not exercised.

Secondly, it was the specialist squads, invariably plain-clothed, that had a different approach, fabricating evidence was rare, although a feature in very high profile such as the 'Birmingham Six': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six. Not being professional in evidence gathering and ignoring current laws was far more frequent, such as the West Midlands Police Serious Crime Squad:http://www.innocent.org.uk/misc/wmidlands.html

[davidbfpo]

Following testimony yesterday by current and retired English police officers before a parliamentary committee (PASC) the media here have devoted front pages (The Times, behind a pay wall) and inches of reporting.

The BBC report 'Police fix crime statistics to meet targets, MPs told':http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25002927

Podcast of the PASC session:http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Pl...eetingId=14214

Then Twitter alerted me to a similar story about the NYPD:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eli-b-...b_1772489.html

[davidbfpo]

The parliamentary Public Administration Select Committee has published a savage critique of the police recording of crime, as the title suggests: Caught Redhanded: Why we can’t rely on Police Recorded Crime.

This is the PASC chair:

Poor data integrity reflects the poor quality of leadership within the police. Their compliance with the core values of policing, including accountability, honesty and integrity, will determine whether the proper quality of Police Recorded Crime data can be restored.

Link:http://www.parliament.uk/business/co...s-substantive/

[davidbfpo]

Thanks to a "lurker" I've started to read 'The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates
The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. Here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers' on:http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Ma...o-crime-rates/

How about murders that are not murders:

How can you be tied to a chair and gagged, with no clothes on, and that’s a [noncriminal] death investigation?.....We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.

Or, with my emphasis:

Take “index crimes”: the eight violent and property crimes that virtually all U.S. cities supply to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its Uniform Crime Report. According to police figures, the number of these crimes plunged by 56 percent citywide from 2010 to 2013—an average of nearly 19 percent per year—a reduction that borders on the miraculous. To put these numbers in perspective: From 1993, when index crimes peaked, to 2010, the last full year under McCarthy’s predecessor, Jody Weis, the average annual decline was less than 4 percent.

[davidbfpo]

A long article, with the headline:

The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates: Part 2 (and sub-title) Murder makes the headlines, but crimes like theft and assault are far more common in Chicago—and your chances of being a victim may be higher than the police are telling you.

Here's a taster:

Of all index crimes, motor vehicle thefts have plunged most. Over the past three calendar years, they’re down 35 percent, again according to the department’s own statistics. (They fell 23 percent last year alone.) Over that same three-year period, burglaries fell 33 percent; aggravated batteries, 20 percent; robberies, 16 percent.

Current and former officers and several criminologists say they can’t understand how a cash-strapped and undermanned department—one that by its own admission has been focusing most of its attention and resources on combating shootings and murders and protecting schoolchildren in a few very violent neighborhoods—could achieve such astounding results. “God Almighty! It’s just not possible,” opines a retired high-ranking officer who reviewed the department’s statistics.

Link:http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Ma...me-statistics/

Compstat is clearly id'd as a tool for enforcing reductions. Ah, NYPD what did you give to us.

[davidbfpo]

The LAPD misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes during a one-year span ending in September 2013, including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies, a Times investigation found.The incidents were recorded as minor offenses and as a result did not appear in the LAPD's published statistics on serious crime that officials and the public use to judge the department's performance.

Same old story alas:http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c...ry.html#page=1

[flagg]

Must be contagious, as minimizing crime statistics was recently a news story down here in NZ too.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/politi...on-crime-stats

[davidbfpo]

I have read quite a few press reports on the consequences in New York city following the murder of two officers, notably the apparent "grass roots" mandated non-productivity - mandated by their PBA one assumes:

For the week of 22 December, citywide traffic tickets dropped 94% from the same period in 2013. Court summons for low-level offences, like public intoxication, also dropped 94%. Parking tickets were down 92%. Overall arrests were down 66%, as well.

Even the BBC has done an in-depth report:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-30659528

A NY Post columnist has a scathing piece, from this distance I assume that paper didn't like the Mayor before:http://nypost.com/2015/01/01/de-blasios-cop-out/

[ganulv]

The Post will dislike whomever necessary on the day in question in order to sell more copies.

I really enjoyed Matt Taibi’s Rolling Stone piece on the slowdown, with my favorite bit quoted below.

If you’re wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests “only when they have to.” (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...rreal-20141231

[davidbfpo]

A short, eighteen minute film by ESPN 'How The NYPD Abused Citizens In The Name of Data, And How One Cop exposed It':

..tells the story of Adrian Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft, as a New York Police Department officer, blew the whistle on the NYPD’s abuse and misuse of CompStat, a system to track crime trends in New York City.

Link:http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...posed-it-all/?

It was released three weeks ago and I have not watched it yet.