Crime

LeDuff: Detroit's $3 Bill Crime Stats

January 07, 2019, 9:53 PM by  Charlie LeDuff

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If my kid came home from school with a math test completed the way Detroit Police Chief James Craig calculates his crime numbers, I'd take the little guy over my knee. Cheating, fudging and faking is no way to run an organization, especially one charged with community safety and well-being.

For the fifth year in a row, Chief Craig held a sock puppet theater, passing out color graphs that showed violent crime had yet again fallen in a city where there are fewer police officers making fewer arrests.

I didn't make it to the press conference, since I was given only 38 minutes notice by email.

But a closer inspection of the colored graphs shows police department statisticians wildly changing the prior years' numbers, making them worse than what was previously reported and thus making the current year's numbers seem better in comparison. I have documented the phenomenon for two years and I am not the only one not surprised.

"It's like telling the rank and file of the department that they got a 25% raise, when all they did was start paying them with Canadian dollars," said Mike Nevin, president of the Detroit Fire Fighters Association, who complained about the lack of police response when firefighters were caught in an active homicide scene in December.

Craig claimed police arrived in six minutes, and Nevin released records showing this was untrue. Now, Nevin finds himself under investigation by the chief for obstruction of justice. "We have a public safety crisis," Nevin said. "These statistics are a dangerous joke. And it's infected the fire department too. These numbers aren't true."

This year, the statistical magic happened with the department now counting violent crime by "victim" rather than "incident," as has always been required by the FBI, but not done by Detroit police. (More than one person can be the victim of a particular crime incident: think double homicide. One incident, two victims). I know what you’re thinking dear reader, wouldn’t that cause the crime numbers to rise? Normally, yes, unless you do what the DPD did, and went back and raised it for the past several years.

The Misleading Colored Graphs

Nevertheless, the chief and his band of bean counters loudly assured me in 2017 that they were indeed counting victims, after the chief conducted the unforgettable press conference with a barricaded madman in the background, berating the FBI for reporting that crime had increased 15% in 2016 in Detroit. There were 12,842 incidents of crime and 13,705 victims, the chief complained then.

But now the latest colored graphs are telling us there were actually 14,568 victims of crime that year.

Wait. It gets more incredulous. The prior year, 2015, was Mayor Mike Duggan's first in charge of the city without the emergency manager standing over him. He needed a good narrative, and Chief James Craig provided one. Violent crime was reported to be down by 13 percent in 2015 as compared with 2014 — an astounding reduction in a major city.

The Detroit Police reported to us and to the FBI that there were 11,846 incidents of violent crimes in 2015. As months passed, that count quietly changed to 13,001. And then it changed to 13,560 and now the number is reported as 15,430 victims of violent crime.

Looking back, that's an actual increase in crime when population loss is taken into account -- not a world-record decline. No one has said a word.

The chief blamed that discrepancy on a computer glitch. A freedom of information request, however, showed no record of a computer glitch or system-wide crash.

Assistant Chief David LeValley now tells me that a new computer system has been installed and that all prior year numbers have been properly retabulated, but he cannot say how many years back the numbers have been retabulated.

Numbers can be numbing, I know. That's why they're called numbers. But numbers are important when determining where precious public dollars go in a city with too few. Remember, the mayor has asked for 5 percent "cost savings" from the police and fire departments. (The city says this money would be reinvested in the departments.)

A colleague of mine, Steve Neavling, who posts at Motor City Muckracker and its Twitter page, has been monitoring the police scanner, since the Nevin/Craig pissing match, trying to get a handle on the lack of police in the streets. He writes:

"Police routinely run out of squad cars to respond to the most violent crimes, often leaving residents to fend for themselves. It's not unusual for police to be unavailable to respond timely to shootings, stabbings, home invasions and domestic violence."

Consider: on New Year's Eve, the average police response time for a "Priority 1" call -- an ongoing potential threat to life -- was 25 minutes, according to internal police documents.

Faking or fudging response times, violent crime statistics and the homicide closure rates is a dangerous game. We need more money for public safety. Not less.



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