Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, November 1, 1998

Statistical manipulation by police goes back decades

By Craig R. McCoy, Michael Matza and Mark Fazlollah,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Not long ago, a joke went by fax from one detective division to another across Philadelphia. For a time, it was pinned to the wall above the assignment desk at North Detectives, Broad and Champlost Streets.

Pearl Harbor: minor disturbance.

U.S.S. Arizona: lost property.

That wisecrack grew out of a culture of statistical manipulation that goes back decades.

In the early 1950s, a Police Department review found that one Center City district had neglected to report 5,000 incidents to which its officers had responded. Mayor Joseph S. Clark and his reform police commissioner, Thomas J. Gibbons Sr., vowed to bring integrity to police statistics.

By the late 1960s, with Frank Rizzo at the department's helm, the city's crime numbers attracted national attention - from critics skeptical of their accuracy and Philadelphia's boast of being America's safest big city.

In 1968, Baltimore Police Chief Donald Pomerleau pointed out that Philadelphia, with twice his city's population, reported less than half as many total crimes, but many more homicides.

``I guess ol' Frank can't hide the bodies,'' Pomerleau said.

In 1972, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the first national survey to measure crime by polling citizens instead of police departments, found that the number of Philadelphians who said they had been victimized was four times as high as the number of crime victims reported by the police to the FBI. None of the four other cities surveyed had such a wide difference.

In explaining the culture of downgrading, current and former Philadelphia officers cited motives ranging from a commissioner's desire to look good to a busy detective's need to cut the workload.

``You've got to keep the stats down. It's all about competition, because every city wants to look better,'' said former Lt. James McGowan, who served in the headquarters statistics unit from 1978 to 1980. ``It's pressure from the top all the time.''

Former Detective Michael Chitwood, the department's most highly decorated officer when he left the force in 1982, said that, in his 19 years in the department, serious crimes were often downgraded.

``When I was in detectives, they would take a burglary, and by the time it left the office, it was a theft,'' said Chitwood, now police chief of Portland, Maine. ``They would take an attempted murder, and it would become an assault.''

Norman A. Carter Jr., who retired from the force as a corporal in 1992 after 25 years, said that captains often revised the incident reports handed in by beat officers.

Carter said it was common for shootings to be written off as ``unfounded,'' even if spent shell casings were found at the scene, as long as no one was hurt and no suspect could be identified.

``It's all about reporting,'' Carter said. ``They're very sensitive to statistics.''

One factor that contributes to downgrading is that captains oversee the preparation of district crime statistics - the same numbers on which their performance is judged.

``It's like letting everyone who ever played golf keep their own score,'' said Richard B. Costello, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. ``They'd all make the PGA tour.''

The New York Police Department dealt with the problem by giving coding responsibility to a central headquarters unit beholden to the commissioner.

James Nocco, 57, who retired in 1995 after 29 years with the Philadelphia police, including four as commander of detectives in North Philadelphia, used a baseball metaphor to make the point that manipulation of statistics is easy - and endemic.

``A captain could tell his staff: `I want to bat .233. I don't need to bat .400. Put me in the middle,' '' Nocco said. ``And his stats would come out at .233.''