Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, July 26, 1998

Timoney throws out crime stats as faulty

Random checks found as many as 4,000 major offenses unreported over the last six months.

By Mark Fazlollah and Craig R. McCoy,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Inquirer news researcher Alletta Emeno contributed to this report.

In a startling admission of his department's failure to count crime accurately, Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney has rejected the crime statistics given him for the first half of the year and ordered a citywide recount.

``With the exception of homicide, I've got no confidence in the figures,'' Timoney said in an interview.

He said he demanded the recount after random checks of police districts across the city found major crime underreported by about 8 percent - meaning that as many as 4,000 serious offenses committed over the last six months had gone unreported.

The commissioner told the FBI on Friday that Philadelphia would not submit statistics for the bureau's influential city-by-city survey of crime for the first half of 1998.

In the interview, Timoney said the department's data ``contained a margin of error that's completely unacceptable.''

Mayor Rendell, in a separate interview, said it had become clear in recent days that the department would not be able to come up with accurate numbers by Aug. 15, the FBI's filing deadline.

The omission of thousands of crimes was discovered through a citywide audit by a unit created by Timoney to ensure the accuracy of the department's crime data, which have been dogged by embarrassing disclosures over the last year.

The underreporting occurred, Timoney said, because police downgraded crimes when coding them for internal use and for submission to the FBI. He cited an example: A shooting might be classified as a ``hospital case'' - driving a sick person to the hospital - when it should have been listed as ``aggravated assault.''

Timoney said the ``vast majority'' of the cases appeared to result from ``stupidity, carelessness, laziness'' and not an intentional effort to cover up crime.

``It's a real cause of concern to me,'' he said. ``And I haven't gotten a satisfactory answer from within the department of what, in fact, the problem is. Maybe it's training. Maybe it's someone who says, `Well, you know, nobody really ever checked on this stuff before.' ''

The department's chronic inability to get its numbers right has wide implications. For one thing, it undermines confidence in official pronouncements about crime. Plus, it threatens to render useless the centerpiece of Timoney's policing strategy - the sophisticated use of statistics to identify crime trends and squelch them.

Equally important, downgrading crimes means that some serious offenses are not fully investigated. For example, the shooting that became a ``hospital case'' would not be referred to detectives. The suspect would be more likely to remain on the street, free to commit other crimes.

``If we're going to do this thing right,'' Timoney said, ``the very first step in the process of fighting crime [is] we've got to know about it. We've got to know where it's happening. How else are we going to take steps two, three and four? We've got to know number one.''

Timoney's decision to withhold crime statistics from the FBI report reflects the seriousness of the problem. It is rare for a major city not to be represented in the survey. Because of Philadelphia's size and crime rate - it accounts for 2 percent of all murders in America - the absence of its numbers will skew the totals for the entire country.

``It will have an effect, a fairly significant effect,'' said Harlin McEwan, an FBI official who conferred with Timoney on Friday. ``When you're talking about the major cities, it has a big impact.''

The recount ordered by Timoney will be arduous. In districts across the city, teams of officers will have to go into the files and retrieve every incident report from the last six months - tens of thousands of documents. Each report will be examined to determine whether the classification - burglary, assault, stolen car and lost property, among many others - matches the narrative written by the responding officer.

Timoney said he hoped the laborious citywide recount would nail down, by year's end, accurate numbers for the first half of 1998.

The commissioner's decision marks the latest in a string of embarrassing disclosures about Philadelphia crime statistics. It marks the third time in 10 months that the city has told the FBI that its numbers were unreliable - and has promised a recount.

Last October, the FBI discarded Philadelphia figures for 1996 and the first half of 1997 after learning that the city had its own peculiar way of counting crime. For at least the last 30 years, the numbers reported to the FBI by Philadelphia police did not reflect the crimes that actually occurred in any given month but, rather, those crimes that officers logged into their records in that period.

Because crime reports often took months to process, a lag developed. As many as 20 percent of the crimes that police reported in a given year actually occurred the year before. That produced distortions in the data and made comparisons with other cities' statistics difficult.

Early this year, Richard Neal, then police commissioner, put the crime count on a true, chronological-year basis and submitted new figures to the FBI for all of 1996 and 1997. Those numbers appeared in an FBI report published May 17. They held up for less than a week.

On May 23, Timoney ordered a partial recount of the 1997 data. He acted in response to an Inquirer analysis that found that thousands of property crimes had been inadvertently dropped.

Timoney initially promised that corrected 1997 numbers would be available within three to five weeks. That didn't happen. While that recount was under way, the citywide audit turned up wider problems in the 1998 numbers - both before and after Timoney took office in March.

In the interview Friday, Timoney said the department still intended to come up with a correct tally for property crimes for 1997. He left little doubt, however, that he distrusted all the 1997 numbers.

``We're counting the stolen cars and the thefts,'' he said, ``but who knows what the robberies are? Who knows what the burglaries are?

``And I'll be damned if I'm going to keep going back and doing other people's work. I've got too many things on my plate right now trying to move this organization forward.''

Timoney spent years in the New York City Police Department, whose number-based crime-fighting techniques paid off with dramatic crime drops. He has said repeatedly that accurate numbers are the bedrock of all efforts to drive down Philadelphia crime.

The commissioner said he stressed over and over at his initial meetings with commanders last spring that the numbers had to be accurate. At later briefings, he said, he underscored that message, telling them: ``Maybe you don't get this. I'm dead serious.''

One of Timoney's first acts as commissioner was to create the Quality Assurance Bureau, headed by Chief Inspector Vincent DeBlasis.

``I can't be any more emphatic,'' Timoney said. ``One captain already lost his command, maybe a second.''

The reference was to Capt. Daniel Castro, who was stripped of his command of a West Philadelphia police district after the Quality Assurance Bureau raised questions about crime data reported by the district. Department officials said that under Castro, thefts, burglaries and robberies were often downgraded, for example, to ``missing property.''

Since his transfer, Castro has not responded to requests for comment.

Department officials said the other district whose crime counting was under investigation was the Second, in the Northeast. The commander, Capt. Gerard Levins, declined comment yesterday.

From at least 1966 to 1994, mayors have boasted that Philadelphia was the safest of the nation's big cities. It fell out of that position in 1995, as other cities drove crime down, in part with innovative policing.

The FBI report released in May said Philadelphia crime in 1997 declined 2 percent - one of the least-impressive declines among big cities. But with the discovery of the underreporting, it is difficult to say exactly what the city's crime rate was in 1997 or early this year.

Philadelphia's flawed numbers for 1997 will also distort the State Police's annual survey of crime in Pennsylvania, to be released shortly. State Police Major Wesley Waugh, director of research, said on Friday that the state's annual report on crime had already been sent to the printer - with incorrect 1997 data for Philadelphia.