Does Detroit have something to hide?
The Detroit Police Department seems to have an issue with crime statistics.
Detroit Police James Craig recently slammed the FBI for its crime statistics, which show violent crime exploding in the city. Odd thing is, the department provided those stats.
Now this: Vice News spent nine months collecting data on fatal and nonfatal police shootings from the 50 largest local police departments in the United States from 2010 through 2016. Not every department was so forthcoming.
The news site reports:
Sometimes, all we needed to do to get records of police shootings was to ask. Police departments in Austin, Texas, and Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, kept nearly complete records of shootings online and responded quickly to our requests for more information.
Other agencies were less transparent.
The Detroit Police Department said it would take up to 3,120 business days and cost at least $77,532 to retrieve records that other departments made available online for free. An official in the Essex County District Attorney’s Office told us that Newark police likely didn’t keep a list of officer-involved shootings so that they could charge reporters fees to retrieve the case files. The Memphis Police Department required a Tennessee resident to file the records request, then asked for $3,300 unless the documents were reviewed in person at police headquarters.
Therefore, on a Vice News map of annual police shootings -- fatal and non-fatal -- per 100,000, people, the map marks Detroit as "unknown."
That makes us wonder
- Does Detroit have something to hide?
- Does it think crime stats are just for the department and city officials?
- Or is the department poorly organized or ill-equipped to maintain such important data?
