Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, November 6, 1998

A Phila. crime left uncounted

By Tom Ferrick Jr.,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

It was like a scene from a made-for-TV movie.

The time: A cool, clear Thursday night in October of last year.

The place: 71st and Buist in Southwest Philadelphia. A neighborhood tight with rowhouses.

The situation: Members of the local town watch, heading home after a meeting at a nearby church, are walking near Elmwood Park.

Suddenly, they hear a commotion. Shouting, doors slamming, the screech of wheels. A car is leaving in a hurry.

A man emerges, aims a gun, and begins firing at the fleeing car. In quick succession, he pulls off eight shots. Pop, pop, pop . . .

Sam Ricks, a town watch member, flips open his cell phone and dials 911, alerting police while the bullets are still flying.

Meantime, Stephan Hall, an off-duty cop who lives in the neighborhood, is driving along Buist and happens upon the commotion. One of the bullets pierces his front door, lodging in the driver's seat.

The shooter hops into a black BMW and tears down 71st.

Police arrive. The off-duty officer and Town Watch members tell them what's up, point them in the direction of the speeding BMW.

The alleged perp is Sherfon ``Terry'' McNair, 40, of the 5500 block of Delancey Street.

McNair is not a stranger to legal travail. He's been arrested twice before for assault and convicted once.

If this were a film, we could cut to the first commercial break. Back in a minute for the neatly packaged final scene.

But this isn't the movies, is it? This is Philadelphia.

For one thing, the shooting on Buist Avenue never gets included in the FBI count of major crimes.

It was one of the estimated 10,000 crimes in Philadelphia each year that fail to make it into the official count because they are miscoded or downgraded by police.

As Inquirer staff writers Craig McCoy, Mark Fazlollah and Michael Matza reported on Sunday and Monday, cops have been cooking the books on crime numbers for years.

Police captains trying to make their numbers look good, detectives trying to lessen their heavy workload, will take stabbings and downgrade them to ``hospital cases.'' Burglaries will become ``lost property.'' Holdups turn into ``threats.''

Major becomes minor. An eraser becomes a magic wand and bibbity bobbity boo, we become one of the safest big cities in America.

Police now have a new system that assigns an incident a number when the call is received at 911. The number stays as the case moves through the system. That's an improvement.

So is the attitude of the new police commissioner, John Timoney, who wants to end the practice of cooking the books.

Timoney believes that accurate reports of crime are necessary in this modern age, when computers can be used as detectives.

As Sam Ricks has learned on town watch: ``Crime is about patterns. They don't do it once and go to Boston. They just keep doing it until they get caught.''

Officer Hall was never informed of McNair's first preliminary hearing on the charges. It was postponed. The defendant showed up for his second hearing in Municipal Court, but the police officer who was supposed to testify didn't. He had training that day.

That was bad news for prosecutors. Because of the jam of cases, judges will often dismiss charges if witnesses fail to show.

That's exactly what Judge William Brady Jr. did. He discharged the case.

Ricks got an award from a public safety group for his quick thinking. The ceremony was in Washington.

``I should have taken the crime report with me and dropped it off at the FBI,'' he says. ``It's the only way to get it counted.''

He was only half-kidding.