From the Crime Files Blog
It's the end of the year and cities like Chicago will be releasing crime statistics to the hunger news reporters - who tell their viewers and readers how safe their city is or is not.
By default, this became a tool for local government to obtain more federal tax dollars. What we really get is a Pandora's box filled with misleading and meaningless stats.
The idea was that data from each incident would be stored for later study and used to better deploy resources. Crimes were classified as to being the more serious, Part One crimes or the less serious Part Two crimes.
Along the way, local politicians found ways to exploit and abuse the Uniform Crime Report statistics to feather their incumbency. When the politicians and police have good numbers, the generate press releases taking credit.
If the numbers were bad, challenging the do their best to fuge them up.
The mainstream media treats these statistics as fact.
Between politicians and their appointed police, creativity is not lost. They soon conspire to subvert the entire concept of the reports to either look better in the public's eyes or to raid the federal treasury.
This is how it works. When an officer would respond to the scene of a residential structure where a door or window was broken and property was taken, the heading of the officer's report should be, Burglary. Then the crime is cleared by an arrest or not. That's simple enough. The problem is that burglaries are an ugly, Party One crime.
The officers are simply told that their reports will be classified as Criminal Damage to Property for the door or window breaking and Theft for the taking of property. They should steer clear of reporting the more serious burglaries. Instead they'd be reporting the softer, and more tolerable Part One crimes or lesser Part Two crimes.
They soon added a little twist to this since showing no burglaries would raise red flags and quickly prove deceptive. They dictated to the officers, that if they made an arrest and cleared the crime, then the officer's report was classified as a Burglary. This way, they could show nearly a 100% clearance report for any and all burglaries!
The rank and file cops nearly always go along with the charade because it makes them and their fellow officers appear to be more effective crime fighters.
Murders are the most difficult of crimes to cover up. Cops can't simply run around hiding the bodies of homicide victims. A better way is to classify the report as a Death Investigation. This is playing with the variables such an accident, a suicide, natural causes or something else. This is really easy to do when the victims are marginal people with no families or friends scrutinizing the cop's actions. A perfect candidate for the cover-up would be dealing with a dead whore found in the dumpster with needle tracks all over her arms. This is the most difficult kind of case to solve anyway. The idea is that the Death Investigation can be reclassified if an arrest is made or not.
Will the news reporters be able to prove the deception? The work involved would bust the budget and resources of any news organization in a large city. But with homicide cases there's a simpler way to uncover the chicanery.
Using public records, and freedom of information laws reporters can obtain the names, dates, locations, cause and manner of death statistics from the county medical examiner or coroner's offices. Then they can match the numbers with the "official police" offering and they may just have some really tough questions for your local police chief about cooking the crime statistic books.
Making the crime statistics of the community match the desired results sought by elected officials, to fool the public and media is a snap.
BLOGNOTES: So, my question is, does Chicago have 499 or 500 murders? Or could it even be more?
7 comments:
"If the numbers were bad, challenging the do their best to fuge them up."
them to do their best fudge them up.
Also HUNGRY reporters
"dead whore found in the dumpster"
Prostitute would be better less inflammatory word.
Anyways great article Craig!
As the headline link shows, this was republished from 2006, both here and the original Crime Files Blog.
How it still holds true today.
Oh, Okay,
good repost.
He should still fix it a little.
Personally I wouldve put (sic) there then, thats more used in quotes though. But thats just me.
I really don't care how many murders there are as 80% of them are gang members who are no loss to society!
They are the garbage that shoots innocent people, especially small children because they have no sense of shame & are brainless morons who can't shoot straight because they think holding a handgun sideways is cool!
So 500 murders means 400 dead gang members & 1000 would mean 800 dead gang members.
I know that would mean 200 others were killed, but half of them will be some sort of domestic that can't be prevented by the cops. Those are husband/wives/friend, etc who go nuts & kill over the stupidest shit, such as the TV is on the wrong channel!
Ask the 2431 beat facilitator about the true #. He knows everything. Hahahahaha!
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