City crime rate rises 11% as police boost reporting

Phila. now ranks 6th safest among the 10 largest cities. Theft and aggravated assault were up, murder down.

Philadelphia, which only four years ago boasted that it was the safest big city in America, now ranks sixth among the 10 largest cities in the nation. Last year, it ranked fourth.

At a time when major crime dropped 7 percent among the nation's largest cities, the count of reported crime in Philadelphia climbed 11 percent, the FBI reported yesterday in its annual release of national crime statistics, commonly called the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program.

Mayor Rendell and Police Commissioner John F. Timoney repeatedly have cautioned that the 1998 figures would show an increase in the crime rate, but that the surge over 1997 figures should not be interpreted as a crime wave on city streets.

Rather, they have said, the 1998 figures would reflect the concerted campaign by the Police Department to change a decades-old police culture of falsifying crime statistics to make the city look safer than it was.

"I don't think it indicates a crime increase," Timoney said of the new figures. "It's an increase in reported crime. We are following the letter of the FBI's law regarding crime reporting so [crimes] that may not have been captured before have been captured."

For decades, Philadelphia mayors boasted that it was the nation's safest city. Indeed, from 1966 to 1994, the FBI said the city had the lowest overall crime rate among the nation's top 10 cities.

It lost that distinction in 1995, when innovative policing in New York and San Diego drove the rates in those cities below that of Philadelphia. In 1997, the city fell again, dropping from third-safest to fourth. The figures released yesterday ranked Philadelphia sixth. The cities with lower crime rates were New York, with the lowest, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Antonio and Houston.

The city reported 106,078 major crimes last year, up from 95,755 the year before. The 1998 figures amount to one victimization for every 14 city residents.

The department will soon make public a crime-by-crime breakdown for all of 1998, Timoney said.

While the new Philadelphia figures showed some positive trends - murders, robberies and car thefts were down sharply - increases in rape, aggravated assault, burglaries and thefts outweighed those improvements in the total count.

The spike in reported incidences of aggravated assaults was especially dramatic - 40 percent. Before Philadelphia police acknowledged last year that there were problems with the numbers, the department logged 6,198 aggravated assaults for 1997. In 1998, according to yesterday's report, the city had 8,701 such assaults.

Thefts also shot up, 25 percent. Philadelphia reported 40,054 thefts in 1997. The 1998 number was 49,892. Nationally among the other nine big cities, larcenies were down 6 percent.

Timoney attributed the surge primarily to finally counting assaults in which people were threatened at gunpoint or with another weapon - but not actually shot or injured.

In past years, police officials in the police districts responsible for categorizing the crime reports would improperly downgrade such assaults, often making them non-crimes. Assaults that had been downgraded usually ended up being classified as "threats," "domestic disturbances" or "investigate person."

In some cases, however, people were shot or stabbed, but the district police reported that no crime had occurred, according to crime-incident reports obtained by The Inquirer.

As for the boom in reported thefts, Timoney said it was largely driven by police now counting stolen license plates and tags, an offense that is especially common in Philadelphia.

"It's a huge issue here," the commissioner said, adding that such crimes "in the past may have gone down as missing property or lost property."

The figures for 1998 also showed increases in rape (16 percent) and burglary (11 percent.) Robbery fell 4 percent.

The big drops came in murder and car theft - widely considered the most reliable figures in the Uniform Crime Reporting program. It's difficult to hide a corpse, and police generally are reluctant to tamper with auto reports because car owners often need a copy of the report for insurance claims.

Murders showed a 21 percent drop, from 428 in 1997 to 338 last year. It was the first year in recent memory that there was a significant drop in Philadelphia killings - although that trend has been underway for the last five years in the rest of America.

Timoney attributed the decline in the murder rate to the department's aggressive attack on gun crime, which has included deploying homicide detectives to investigate shootings even when the victim survives. The strategy is designed to stop shooters before vendettas escalate to homicides.

But even with the drop in homicide for 1998, Philadelphia had the third-worst murder rate among the 10 largest cities in America, exceeded only by Detroit and Chicago. Philadelphia's murder rate was nearly triple that of New York and eight times San Diego's.

Auto thefts fell 13 percent, from 22,536 to 19,523. The department has implemented a series of policy changes, including a formal investigation of every auto theft. Until the change, reports were routinely taken by phone with virtually no follow-up by police.

Even with the decline, Philadelphia's auto-theft rate is high. Among the top 10 cities, six had a lower rate.

Problems with Philadelphia's crime statistics have dogged the department since late 1997 after a series of news reports about problems in the data. These forced the police to do multiple recounts, and last year, the commissioner withheld flawed statistics from the FBI.

In early 1998, the department provided The Inquirer with a crime-by-crime breakdown of 1997 crimes reported to the FBI. The paper's analysis of that data plus interviews with district police captains showed that 3,000 crimes had not been recorded.

After Timoney was presented with the analysis, he ordered a review, including a painstaking hand recount of crime-incident reports. The recount showed that police had failed to report 2,559 car thefts and 500 other larcenies. Restoring those crimes to the count turned the city's purported 2 percent overall decrease in crime for the year into a 2 percent increase.

After a broader review of the department's 23 districts, police auditors later estimated that 1 in 10 crimes - 11,700 in 1998 - were being routinely dropped from the overall crime tally.

The city's current Five-Year Plan, released in January, states flatly that the department has determined that in the past, "many incident reports were miscoded - in some cases intentionally."

Timoney's top commanders have said that the culture of downgrading crime was deeply ingrained within the force and that it would take time - years, even - to root out all of the problems.

Even with the dramatic jump in reports of aggravated assault, for example, the figures for that crime are still at variance with reported aggravated assaults in other large U.S. cities.

It was 22 percent below the average per-capita assault rate for the major U.S. cities in 1998.

Nine of the 10 major cities have more aggravated assaults than robberies. Los Angeles, for one, has twice as many assaults as holdups.

Philadelphia was the exception. It reported that 11,435 people were robbed last year but only 8,701 assaulted.

Lawrence Sherman, a University of Maryland criminologist and consultant to the Philadelphia police on crime figures, has said a city's statistics probably are unreliable if the relationship between aggravated assaults and robberies is far out of step with the national norms.

Addressing questions about the number of aggravated assaults in Philadelphia, Timoney said his auditing staff would continue to review the numbers.

Nevertheless, he said he was confident they would withstand scrutiny.