Ben Poston and Joel Rubin report at
The Los Angeles Times:
The LAPD misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes during a one-year span ending in September 2013, including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies, a Times investigation found.
The incidents were recorded as minor offenses and as a result did not appear in the LAPD's published statistics on serious crime that officials and the public use to judge the department's performance.
Nearly all the misclassified crimes were actually aggravated assaults. If those incidents had been recorded correctly, the total aggravated assaults for the 12-month period would have been almost 14% higher than the official figure, The Times found.
The tally for violent crime overall would have been nearly 7% higher.
...
If the misclassifications were mainly inadvertent, police would be expected to make a similar number of mistakes in each direction — reporting serious crimes as minor ones and vice versa, said Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
But The Times' review found that when police miscoded crimes, the result nearly always was to turn a serious crime into a minor one.
Fans of the old TV series
The Wire will immediately recognize the ploy as
"juking the stats."
