De Blasio Denies That The NYPD Fudges Crime Stats. The Truth Is More Complicated.

This week, after a group of public defenders accused the NYPD of manufacturing a crime increase in order to justify a rollback of criminal justice reforms, Mayor Bill de Blasio offered a full-throated defense of his police department and a blistering attack on anyone who would question their numbers.

"I think the public defenders should be ashamed of themselves," de Blasio told WNYC's Brian Lehrer on Friday morning. "You can agree or disagree with any given policy, but the NYPD has been extraordinarily transparent via CompStat, including putting out all sorts of information that isn't convenient to put out, but is the truth on a regular basis and explaining it and answering to it."

In fact, when the NYPD asked three former prosecutors to review their crime statistics in 2013, they confirmed what researchers and whistleblowers had been saying since the dawn of the CompStat era: the police department sometimes fudges the numbers.

"A close review of the NYPD’s statistics and analysis demonstrate that the misclassifications of reports may have an appreciable effect on certain reported crime rates," reads the carefully written report—which takes pains to stress that it is not an official "audit."

The report noted that the crimes most susceptible to downgrading usually involve stolen property: larcenies are downgraded to "lost property," and robberies are downgraded to larcenies.

"This was a panel appointed by the police commissioner. These were not some wild-eyed, academic, left wing people saying this," said professor Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the co-author of “The Crime Numbers Game" with professor John Eterno of Molloy College on Long Island.

Silverman said that he and Eterno presented their own findings on crime stat manipulation to the prosecutors, who then made a series of modest recommendations that then-Commissioner Ray Kelly adopted. A few years later, a group of officers in the Bronx were disciplined for downgrading crimes.

"We did surveys of the police department, where the police attested to the pressure to keep crime down, and the pressure to move crime to one category or another," Silverman said. "This is nothing new, adjusting figures." (The police department denied this, and former Commissioner Bill Bratton even came out of the woodwork to defend CompStat and the NYPD's statistics from Silverman and Eterno's research.)

According to the most recent crime data unveiled at a Thursday press conference, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies, and auto thefts are all up, while reported rapes and murders are down.

"We're talking about a 20 percent increase in major index crimes – we saw it in January, we saw it in February. This is not small stuff," de Blasio said on the radio. "We’ve had, you know, 25 years overall, Brian, of steady decline. Particularly the last six years, I'm proud to say, we've had very consistent decline. How do you have a 20 percent increase for two full months out of the blue? A good part of it is related to the new [bail reform] law."

Yet to Eterno, a former NYPD Captain, this narrative is what makes the crime spike so suspicious.

"If your crime rate is being looked at and you're being judged on the crime rate you want to make sure that crime is going down. For the past 25 years we've seen crime going straight down, and as a criminologist, I know when you see numbers going straight down like that without any fluctuation it's very likely the numbers are being played with," Eterno said.

"For the more recent reason, they're looking to put political pressure on Albany to make it look a little worse than it is, because they want to blame the bail reform act."

Eterno said he does think that crime is probably increasing somewhat, but that it's not likely to be from criminal justice reforms.

"It wouldn't be this quick. A lot of the bail reform act was actually started before January 1st, judges already knew this thing was coming into place," Eterno explained. "Yet we didn't see a spike until after January 1st, which is an indication that the NYPD might be playing with those numbers in order to get a political boost."

In a statement, NYPD spokesperson Sergeant Jessica McRorie called the public defenders' assertions "flawed" and "absurd."

"In the first month of the year there was an increase in 'DP’s' or decisions to decline to prosecute. Looking solely at prosecution data has no bearing on whether or not a victim’s car was stolen. We are talking to all of the victims of reported crimes while they are counting only some of the offenders."

The Mayor's Office has not responded to our requests for comment.

After a federal judge ruled that the NYPD was unconstitutionally stopping and frisking New Yorkers, an independent federal monitor was installed to oversee a series of reforms. One of the problems the monitor has called out is the department's under-reporting of stops.

Another reform arising from Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk era: the NYPD Inspector General, which has the authority to audit the NYPD's closely-held crime data.

"You need an outside government agency or a federal agency or something other than a mayoral agency that should be looking at those numbers," Eterno said. "Right now there is no transparency, we have no idea what's going on with those numbers, how the numbers are collected and so forth."

Eterno added, "To the officers that I know who are still active and still talk with me, it's still happening."

He said that many officers who are serving now only know the CompStat era, where crime reports are massaged.

"They think that yeah, we read this, then the desk sergeant reads it, then it goes to a whole group of people at the precinct that read it, re-read it, call back complainants, and so forth, that's normal, that's what's done. No. That's not the way it should be done. You shouldn't be calling back complainants to try and move it from an index crime to a non-index crime."

Silverman said, "You need transparency. Without transparency, we're all just poking in the dark."

The NYPD did not answer our questions about whether they would allow for an independent audit of their crime stats, or when the last major audit was done.

"The integrity of the reporting system is a staple of the NYPD and there are numerous levels of checks and balances, audits, and robust oversight to ensure the proper classification of crime reports," Sergeant McRorie said.