Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuesday, November 3, 1998

Rendell: Crime numbers will rise

It is not that crime is up, the mayor said. Rather, he vowed, police will now report it accurately after decades of fudging.

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

Mayor Rendell said yesterday that Philadelphia faced a ``painful'' period in which counting crime honestly and accurately - something he said police had not done for decades - would drive up the city's crime rate, at least on paper.

``If you see an uptick in the crime statistics,'' the mayor said, ``that's not because crime has risen. It's because we're accurately reporting.''

Speaking at a conference on crime and violence at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Center City, Rendell said he backed Police Commissioner John F. Timoney's efforts to uproot an entrenched police culture of underreporting crime.

``John has done something which I think is enormously important. It's also painful,'' Rendell said. ``That is, starting to count crimes the right way. We had never done that, at least never for decades in Philadelphia.''

An Inquirer series published Sunday and yesterday described how police have routinely downgraded crimes against people and property, converting major offenses to minor ones and taking some incidents out of the official count altogether.

``Police commanders have always had the impetus to downgrade statistics so they could look better,'' Rendell said yesterday. He said low-balling of crime had ``been going on for 20, 30 years here, maybe more. And in other cities as well.''

Timoney, also at the conference, told the group of academics, law enforcement officials and anti-violence activists that accurate and timely data were key to making the city safer. He said, for instance, that computerized crime maps can alert police to a pattern of incidents so they arrest suspects early, before they can claim new victims.

Timoney, who took over the department in March, promised to produce an accurate count of crime.

``We'll get it right,'' he said. ``It really is extremely, extremely important that the crime data be accurate.''

The fudging of numbers is systemic and deep, the Inquirer series said. Police auditors who have been examining incident reports at Timoney's direction say that as many as 10,000 serious crimes a year - nearly 1 in 10 - are downgraded or dropped from the ledger entirely.

Soon after he was appointed, Timoney established a special auditing unit and stripped two captains of their district commands after departmental auditors raised questions about the accuracy of statistics compiled under their supervision.

In recent months, reported crime in Philadelphia has surged as officers have reacted to the commissioner's moves. In August and September, the average number of major crimes reported each week jumped sharply. Aggravated assaults soared 66 percent compared with earlier in the year. Burglaries were up 28 percent, and thefts rose 27 percent

Rendell and Timoney spoke yesterday at a United Way conference - ``Safe Communities/Safe Families'' - that drew more than 300 people, including neighborhood leaders, domestic-abuse specialists, directors of nonprofit programs, academics and law enforcement officials.

For decades, Philadelphia mayors and police commissioners have boasted that theirs was the safest or among the safest of large U.S. cities, based on the FBI's annual nationwide survey, the Uniform Crime Report. The FBI relies on statistics supplied by police departments.

When Philadelphia police code incidents, The Inquirer found, beatings and stabbings sometimes become ``hospital cases.'' Burglaries have been redefined as ``missing property,'' car break-ins as ``vandalism'' and holdups as ``threats.'' Rapes have gone on the books as ``investigate persons.''

In each case, the new category is not a major crime as defined by the FBI.

Among cases of downgrading described in the Inquirer series were two - a knifepoint robbery and the theft of a teacher's wallet - in which police incident reports were rewritten to remove key information showing that a crime had been committed.

The robbery was reclassified as a minor ``disturbance'' and the theft as ``lost property.''

Given copies of the conflicting police reports, Timoney on Friday ordered an internal affairs investigation.

Asked yesterday whether he was surprised by the rewriting of incident reports, Rendell replied: ``No. I wasn't surprised by that.''

District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, who also attended yesterday's conference, said police had been fudging the numbers for many years.

``The problem,'' she said, ``is there is such pressure to come in as one of the safest cities in America that someone thinks they're doing a favor by downgrading.''

Abraham said that in some cases, decisions on how to classify an incident fall in a gray area, but she added: ``When you're robbed, don't call it lost property.''

Rendell has frequently cited the city's low rate of reported crime in his five-year plans for the city, backing up the claim with references to the FBI survey. His 1997 five-year plan included a bar chart showing Philadelphia with the third-lowest rate of major crimes among the nation's largest cities.

Yesterday, Rendell told reporters: ``I never held much faith in those statistics, here or in other cities.

``The only statistic we know that's fairly reliable is murder because we've got a dead body. Other than that, I'm not sure that those statistics were ever reliable.''