Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, November 1, 1998

How to cut city's crime rate: Don't report it

She came at him with a six-inch knife, backing 76-year-old Ernest Dailey into the bathroom of his tiny apartment.

The woman and an accomplice rifled the place and left. Dailey emerged to find his 27-inch color TV and CD changer missing.

By any definition, that's a robbery - one of the seven serious offenses the FBI uses to calculate the crime rates of the nation's biggest cities.

But in the Philadelphia Police Department, it went on the books as something else altogether: a minor altercation.

The incident report written by the patrolman sent to Dailey's home that night listed the knife, the accomplice, all the ingredients of the crime.

Later, someone rewrote it and took out that information.

Dailey's midnight ordeal was reduced to incident code 3301:

``Disturbance.''

Not a crime.

``Say what?'' Dailey said when told of the revision. ``How can you call that a disturbance? . . . She pulled a dagger knife on me!''

For decades, Philadelphia mayors and police commissioners have declared their city one of the safest in America.

The boast is pinned on Philadelphia's ranking in the Uniform Crime Report, the inch-thick diary of crime in America published annually by the FBI. For decades, the survey has pegged Philadelphia as the safest, or among the safest, of the 10 largest cities.

But the boast rests on quicksand, an Inquirer investigation has found. Through years of fudging, the city's crime statistics have become divorced from what they are supposed to describe: the incidence of crime on the streets of the nation's fifth-largest city.

Police routinely downgrade crime, converting major offenses into minor ones that do not appear in the FBI survey, and they sometimes eliminate incidents from the record altogether, The Inquirer found.

Stabbings and beatings become ``hospital cases.'' Burglaries are redefined as ``lost property,'' car break-ins as ``vandalism.'' Holdups become ``threats.'' Rapes have gone on the books as ``investigate persons.''

The practice is so pervasive it even has a name. Police call it ``going down with crime.''

``It's been an epidemic in the department for years,'' said Deputy Police Commissioner Charles J. Brennan, 49, a 25-year veteran and the department's top statistical officer for the last decade. ``It's part of a culture. No one ever really got in trouble for going down with crime.''

The extent of the fudging is huge. Police auditors who have been poring over incident reports at the direction of a new police commissioner, John F. Timoney, say that as many as 10,000 serious crimes a year - nearly 1 in 10 - are downgraded or dropped from the ledger entirely.

The reliability of police statistics has been questioned in other cities. In the last year, Atlanta, Baltimore and New York have been accused of sugar-coating crime numbers. But by all evidence, Philadelphia stands out in the scope and severity of the problem.

The numbers have been tampered with so thoroughly and for so long that the Police Department lacks a sure grasp of the rate and pattern of crime in its own city. About the only thing that is clear regarding crime in Philadelphia is that there is more of it than police have acknowledged.

The consequences of this sleight-of-hand are serious:

Some crimes do not get investigated. When serious offenses are airbrushed into minor ones, the paperwork often does not get referred to detectives for follow-up. In a partial review of 1998 crime reports in two police districts, department auditors have identified several dozen cases where that happened.

Victims go uncompensated. A state program that pays people up to $35,000 for medical bills and other crime-related costs generally learns about the cases - and contacts victims - only if the incidents are classified as major crimes.

Efforts to police more effectively are thwarted. Sophisticated statistical analysis and mapping of crime - the cornerstone of Timoney's philosophy - have scant hope of succeeding if the numbers on which they rely are skewed.

The public is denied a true picture of crime. Citizens cannot accurately judge the safety of their city or neighborhood, or how well the Police Department is doing its job, if its crime statistics are worthless.

The motives for defining crime down vary. In some cases, harried detectives do it to reduce their workloads. Captains and other commanders also have a strong temptation to push offenses down the scale of severity. They know that sprucing up the numbers within their turf polishes their image with their bosses - the police commissioners and mayors who must answer to the public.

Some crimes vanish from the records because careless or poorly trained officers make mistakes. But a large number of downgradings are deliberate, reflecting an entrenched culture of cooking the books.

The Inquirer reviewed police reports and court documents, examined computer records on thousands of major crimes reported by Philadelphia police to the FBI since 1991, and interviewed dozens of crime victims, police officers and commanders.

The review found that in recent years police have:

Classified hundreds of beatings, stabbings, and similar incidents as simple assaults. Other big-city departments book such attacks as aggravated assaults. Aggravated assaults are reported to the FBI for inclusion in its nationwide survey. Simple assaults are not.

Coded some reported rapes as ``investigate persons,'' putting the cases in a statistical limbo.

Masked scores of assaults with such labels as ``hospital case.'' One such coding - ``domestic abuse/hospital transportation'' - was introduced to measure spousal abuse. But the department made that a category for service calls, not crimes. The result: Many domestic assaults given the ``hospital'' label never make it into the crime statistics. Auditors who reviewed 250 such cases this year say 80 percent were assaults and should have been recorded as such.

Rewritten some incident reports to delete mention of guns, knives and suspects in order to downgrade the crimes.

Mayor Rendell, who in the past trumpeted the city's crime statistics to defuse criticism of the Police Department, now acknowledges that the numbers are not reliable. He said the blame for that should be widely distributed.

``Blame 25 years of commanders. Blame me because I didn't get on the bandwagon fast enough,'' Rendell said in a recent interview. ``I've always thought that these statistics were a little shaky. . . . I think the people of this city, or any city, deserve an accurate count.''

At 6-foot-1 and 140 pounds, Ernest Dailey is a spindly figure in thin gray shorts, calf-high socks, and a white tank top. He wears a crucifix on a chain around his neck. His head has vestiges of gray hair.

In his youth, Dailey said, he was a truck driver, a bartender, and a Bellevue-Stratford valet. Now his world is a one-room efficiency in a modest retirement village in the city's Powelton section.

Because his legs are weak, he depends on younger people to run errands for him. That, he said, is how he met Andrea Gresham, 32, who introduced herself as ``Tammy.''

Every week or so, Tammy would go to the grocery store for Dailey, and he would tip her $5, he said.

One night in March, Dailey said, she called his name outside his door at 1:30 a.m. When he opened the door a crack, he said, she forced her way in, pointing a hunting knife with a six-inch blade at his belly.

Dailey said Tammy shoved him back into his bathroom. He slammed and locked the door. Hearing no noise after a couple of minutes, Dailey emerged to find his TV and CD changer missing.

Patrolman Nick Lai responded and took Dailey's statement.

``I just did what they taught me at the [Police] Academy,'' Lai said: He took down the victim's story in the victim's words.

Dailey described the knife, and estimated the value of the stolen equipment at $460. He said a male accomplice had lurked in the hallway and helped Tammy lug away the loot. He described Tammy's appearance, and provided her telephone number.

Lai, 30, wrote all of that down on the incident report.

A supervisor in the 16th Police District station house classified the incident as a robbery, and the carbon of Lai's signed report was passed on to detectives, who began their investigation by taking photographs of Dailey's apartment.

At some point, someone rewrote the report on a separate incident form, using the same report ID number but omitting any mention of the knife, Tammy's phone number, and the accomplice.

The second report, which bears Lai's name in block letters, did not classify the incident as a robbery. Instead, the author assigned it incident code 3301, defined as a ``disturbance, minor, indoors,'' not a crime.

Shown copies of both reports, Lai said the one with his signature is the one he wrote. He said he had never seen the second one before.

Chief Inspector Vincent R. DeBlasis, 60, a 39-year veteran who heads a new Quality Assurance Bureau created to audit crime figures, said he could think of no valid reason there would be two conflicting reports of the same incident.

``You should never have two 48s,'' he said, using police jargon for the narrow one-page forms.

On Friday, after reviewing copies of the two reports at The Inquirer's request, Timoney said through a spokeswoman that he had no explanation for what happened and had ordered an Internal Affairs investigation.

Gresham was arrested two weeks after the incident and charged with knifepoint robbery, but she did not appear for trial. She is now serving a 3-to-6-year prison term for burglary and theft in an unrelated incident.

As for Dailey, he said he could not understand why police logged the incident as anything other than robbery.

``How could it be a disturbance when they took a 27-inch TV?'' he asked. ``How could there be changes [in the police report]? I gave it to them just like it was. I don't understand how it could go down like that.''

There's no telling who got the drop on Rysheed Mack.

The 16-year-old left his Mantua home March 2 and was on his way to the 40 Stop Mini Mart at 40th and Market Streets, running an errand for his cousin, when a man with a moustache in his early 20s hip-checked him into an alley near Filbert Street.

The man drew a gun.

``You know what it is, fam. Give me the money,'' he demanded.

``He put the gun to me and said: `I'll blow your brains out,' '' Mack said in an interview.

Mack, a junior at University City High School, said he kept $20 balled up in one hand so the man wouldn't see it. Then, as quickly as he pounced, the gunman retreated.

When Mack got home, his cousin called 911, and a patrolman came to take his statement.

Responding officers are trained to simply write down what the victim tells them. Back at the district station house, corporals and sergeants in the ``operations room'' read the report and decide how to code the offense. The operations room reports to the district captain, who typically keeps a close watch on crime patterns and the coding of incidents.

The patrolman wrote up the episode as ``Attempt robbery point of gun'' and delivered the report to the 16th District at 39th Street and Lancaster Avenue.

There, it was downgraded to an ``809,'' the numerical designation for ``terroristic threats'' - a minor offense not included in the FBI's nationwide surveys.

Departmental auditors recently reviewed the case and upgraded it - to attempted robbery.

Nowhere is the disconnect between crime on the street and crime on the books more striking than in the category of aggravated assault.

For years, Philadelphia has claimed one of the lowest rates for that crime of any big city in America. Aggravated assault is defined by the FBI and Pennsylvania law as an attack that inflicts or intends to inflict serious injury.

When someone is shot at, it is automatically an aggravated assault. It makes no difference whether the bullet hits its target.

Year after year, most big cities report about 50 aggravated assaults for each homicide.

Philadelphia reports 15 such assaults for every killing, an Inquirer analysis shows.

Jan Chaiken, director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington, said the Philadelphia numbers were a red flag.

``Everybody who works in criminology trusts the homicide figures,'' Chaiken said in an interview. ``You don't throw away a homicide casually. So the fact that they show no apparent relationship with aggravated assaults is troubling. It fuels concern.''

Where have all the aggravated assaults gone?

Some vanish into noncrime categories, written off as service calls such as hospital transportation, The Inquirer review found. Many others are turned into simple assaults, an offense not included in the FBI's serious-crime tally.

That's what happened in the case of Darren Graham, a ``safety ambassador'' for the University City Special Services District.

Graham, 31, unarmed and wearing the district's bright-yellow uniform, was on foot patrol Feb. 1 when he saw a man and woman arguing outside the 40th Street entrance to the Market-Frankford Elevated.

Trained in conflict resolution, Graham moved to intervene.

The man pulled out a revolver. Graham leaped down the subway stairs as the gunman fired a shot at him.

Police responded quickly to a 911 call. In his report, Patrolman Donnell Creighton Sr. wrote down the incident as Graham had described it to him: as a shooting. By definition, that made it an aggravated assault.

Back at the station house, it was downgraded to a simple assault.

One carbon of the incident report was kept in the station house. A second went to detectives. The third and final copy went to police headquarters, completing the standard paper trail for ``48s.''

The headquarters copy is used to measure crime trends within police districts - and thus the performance of captains. Those internal figures form the basis of the monthly sessions at which commanders are grilled about crime patterns on their turf and prodded to come up with creative solutions.

The headquarters copies are also used to generate the crime maps that increasingly govern police deployment and tactics.

When an incident is downgraded, the original offense - in Graham's case, being shot at - doesn't show up on the maps. As far as the headquarters brass know, it never happened. And the district captain is deprived of accurate information on what is happening in his territory, and where.

``He deploys people wrong,'' said DeBlasis, the department's top auditor of crime numbers. ``It's garbage all over the map.''

Day in, day out, Philadelphia police engage in a massive paper chase, writing, filing, tracking and reconciling about 2 million reports a year that document citizens' contacts with police and follow-up by detectives.

Of those 2 million reports, just 5 percent - 96,000 in Philadelphia last year - involve incidents classified as major crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and vehicle theft.

In FBI jargon, these are the ``Part I'' crimes, the serious seven, and they are the mercury in the crime barometer. ``Part II'' crimes are lesser offenses, including simple assault, vandalism, drug possession and drunken driving.

Only Part I crimes go into a city's crime rate as calculated by the FBI. So downgrading a shooting to a hospital case or an aggravated assault to a simple assault helps improve the city's crime report card.

Under FBI rules, it makes no difference for reporting purposes whether a burglary or other crime is successful. Police are supposed to record an attempted robbery, where the criminal leaves emptyhanded, the same as one that succeeds. Both are Part I major crimes.

Once he took over the department in March, Timoney, a former first deputy police commissioner in New York, immediately grew suspicious of the department's statistics.

One of his first moves was to create the Quality Assurance Bureau, the internal auditing arm headed by DeBlasis. Over the summer, he stripped two captains of their district commands and put them on night duty after questions were raised about the accuracy of crime numbers compiled under their supervision.

In July, after reviewing the department's preliminary crime figures for the first half of 1998, he pronounced them unreliable and refused to submit them to the FBI for its midyear national survey. No Philadelphia police commissioner had ever done that before.

``With the exception of homicide,'' Timoney declared at the time, ``I've got no confidence in the figures.''

At Timoney's order, auditors are poring over incident reports and performing a citywide recount for 1998. In the process, they are unearthing hundreds of serious offenses that had been buried or minimized, and shining a light on what had been the department's dirty secret.

``If a crime has been committed, it should be reported,'' the commissioner said in an interview. ``This is not rocket science.''

The first police district to come under scrutiny was the 16th in West Philadelphia. That's where Mack lives and where Graham was on patrol when he was shot at.

The departmental review found 63 major crimes that were downgraded to Part II offenses or service calls, such as driving an injured person to the hospital, between Jan. 1 and March 20, internal documents show. Those incidents were recoded to reflect what actually happened.

In June, Timoney transferred the commander of the 16th, Capt. Daniel Castro, to a night command spot at police headquarters.

Castro, at 35 the youngest district commander in the city, was considered a rising star and was praised by community groups for a get-tough approach. He had released figures showing a big reduction in crime in his district.

Castro declined to be interviewed unless he could review a copy of this article before publication. In a letter, he said: ``I categorically deny any wrongdoing.''

Timoney said of Castro: ``I happen to like him. He's a young, aggressive cop. He's very smart. He'll be a better man because of this.''

The woman said the man beat and raped her in front of his friends. The district didn't book it as a crime. The department now says it was a rape.

The victim called police from her home after fleeing a house on North 40th Street in West Philadelphia where, she said, she had been raped. Two officers were dispatched.

``She was struck three times and forced to remove her clothes,'' the responding officers wrote on their report of the January incident. ``He then proceeded to rape her in front of four males.''

The woman gave the officers the name and age of her assailant, information they included in their report.

Later, the incident was classified ``investigate person'' - a way of saying police were still sorting out what happened.

The report was obtained by The Inquirer with the victim's name blacked out by the Police Department to protect her identity. Her identity was made known to the newspaper by someone critical of the department's coding of the case. Approached by reporters, the woman readily agreed to talk, provided her name was not published.

In the interview, she said she had gone to the house on 40th Street to borrow money to buy drugs. ``I figured maybe because I was using [drugs], nobody was going to do nothing about it anyway,'' she said, referring to police.

Timoney declined to discuss the case in detail, but said that police had investigated properly and that the woman was unwilling to prosecute.

The victim told The Inquirer that wasn't so. ``I was violated,'' she said. ``If in any kind of way I could have got back at him, I would have.''

Even if she had declined to prosecute, the incident should have been classified as a rape. FBI guidelines state: ``Even though the victim refuses to cooperate, count an offense.'' If later investigation determines the complainant was lying, police are supposed to strike the rape from the crime count and notify the FBI.

Departmental auditors reexamined the West Philadelphia case and designated it a rape.

DeBlasis said the department had allowed ``a lot'' of rapes to languish in the ``investigate person'' category, thus keeping them out of the official tally. He declined to specify a number. He said the FBI objected to the practice last year, prompting the department to order a halt to it.

As for the victim of the North 40th Street attack, she said she got psychological counseling and drug treatment after the rape, was now clean, and recently got a job with a delivery company.

``Now, by the grace of God,'' she said, ``I'm just trying to move on.''

The pistol-whipping finally forced Fletcher McBride, 73, to use the dead bolt on his door. But to the police officers who coded the incident, it was a simple assault, nothing to tell the FBI about.

The McBride barbershop is an outpost of civility in a struggling Mantua neighborhood. Portraits of Jesus and McBride's dog-eared high school diploma adorn the walls of his two-chair shop, where haircuts are $8 and a sink stands alone in the middle of the floor. Outside, crumbling rowhouses spill whole facades into the street.

McBride, who wears a 1925 silver dollar on a chain around his neck to commemorate his birth, has been a barber here for 27 years.

For 27 years, his door was unlocked whenever the shop was open.

All that changed Feb. 27, after a man in a black cap and sunglasses entered with a pistol.

``Give it up! You know what I want,'' the man shouted, shoving McBride into a marble shelf, which shattered, scattering barber supplies.

The intruder brought the gun down on McBride's forehead, opening a gash. The barber staggered toward the hiding place where he kept his own gun and grabbed it.

The gunman fled. McBride called 911.

Responding Patrolmen Marvin Ruley and Donnell Creighton Sr. wrote up the incident as a ``robbery attempt.''

In a brief interview, Ruley said he remembered the incident and had no doubt about what it was. ``That's a robbery,'' he said.

At the station house, it was coded a minor assault. The downgrade took it from a Part I major crime to a Part II minor offense.

McBride has moved his gun from its hiding place to his hip when he's at work. Behind a locked door.

Tomorrow: How property crimes are taken off the books.