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"Disappearing” Urban Crime
By Nicholas Stix
“The news for New York City is spectacular," New York’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a City Hall press conference on Monday. He and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly [Email him] were claiming credit for new FBI crime stats showing major crimes—murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, car theft, larceny and arson—dropping 5.8% in the city in 2003. New York’s crime rate now ranks it 211th of the 230 U.S. cities with 100,000-plus population—behind Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas.
Unfortunately, there must have been at least one skeptic at the press conference. Hizzoner reportedly “bristled” at suggestions that the city's crime stats are being driven down artificially by numbers-fudging police commanders.
“‘C’mon,” Bloomberg snapped. “It is just not the case. ‘” [Our incredible shrinking crime rate, by David Saltonstall, New York Daily News, May 25, 2004]
Well, I am a skeptic. I say: sure, it’s the case! Because I’ve seen it.
Some reporters – most notably Leonard Levitt of Newsday—have intermittently written on crimes that have been “disappeared” in New York by creative police reporting. But to my knowledge, I am the only journalist actually to have been at the scene of one.
It occurred on December 8, 1995—when New York’s crime decline had been supposedly underway for some five years. At about 10:30 p.m., on a Queens-bound A train, a man ended an argument with two brothers by shooting one of them. Then he exited at Kingston-Throop station, in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Riding two cars away, I neither saw nor heard the shooting. However, I interviewed a witness, saw the 20-something black victim on a gurney doing a convincing impression of a corpse, his inconsolable, raging (and apparently twin) brother accompanying him, and two emergency medical technicians wheeling away the gurney.
Since the train was a crime scene, we passengers had to exit it and the station, walk through “Bed-Stuy” to the Manhattan-bound local station, take a train three stops, and then turn around on a Queens-bound train that skipped the crime scene station.
It took me over three hours to get home that night.
In the subway below and on the street above, I counted no less than 39 police officers of every rank—an extraordinary response.
The huge response was because, approximately 12 hours earlier, a black supremacist named Roland Smith Jr. a.k.a. Abubunde Mulocko, had entered Jewish-owned Freddie’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, which was besieged by a racist “boycott,” yelled “It’s on!,” and ordered all customers to leave. In what became known as the Harlem Massacre, Smith proceeded to shoot four people, set the store ablaze, murder seven (non-white) store employees, and commit suicide.
That made for at least five shootings on December 8.
A few weeks later, I asked NYPD press rep Officer Kathie Kelly if there had been any shootings on December 8. She told me she’d get back to me.
Later, she informed me: “There were no shootings on the eighth.”
Since 1991, I have fought off at least eight racial attacks, including two attempted muggings. All were “disappeared” by police or prosecutors—even when I had bloody wounds; when the police had been called to the scene by a subway motorman or (unbeknownst to me) an anonymous witness who corroborated my depiction of events; or when the attack took place on camera, in front of a black postal police officer. (In 1994, a black New Jersey bus driver who had recently fled Brooklyn, suggested that. in New York, crime victims require legal representation no less than defendants, if they wish their cases prosecuted.)
And the fudging of crime statistics is not just a story in the Naked City.
On October 23, 2003, five New Orleans police officers—including First District captain, Norvel Orazio, a 29-year veteran, who had won awards for reducing crime—were fired, and a sixth was demoted, for improperly downgrading crime complaints so that they would not show up in crime statistics.
On February 20, an audit of Atlanta’s police records showed that the suppression and loss of crime records was endemic for many years, with 22,000 police reports of 911 calls disappearing in 2002 alone.
Similar mini-scandals have also occurred in recent years in Philadelphia and Boca Raton, Florida.
Urban police departments have for years been under intense pressure to reduce violent crime. But blacks and Hispanics have a virtual monopoly over urban violent crime. (In New York City in 1998, 89.2 percent of suspects in violent crimes were black or Hispanic.) And police officials dare not offend outraged black and Hispanic criminals, or their supporters in the media and in politics who constantly invent “racial profiling” hoaxes.
The police’s job is impossible. And so, instead of policing hoodlums, today’s modern, urban police managers aggressively police ... impressions. The “disappearing” of crime is one of their leading impression management methods.
Critics may counter: “So what are you saying, they’re hiding bodies?!”
Not at all. Keep in mind: most crime reporters do not ride late at night in subway cars to observe crime firsthand, drive through city streets listening to police scanners and racing to crime scenes, or take inventory at city morgues. They are more likely to ride through the city in taxicabs. Many seem to know—or want to know—only why police officials deign to tell them. And these officials simply refuse to report many violent felonies.
Detectives engage in the wholesale “unfounding” of crimes i.e. determine that allegation were “unfounded.” And murders are reclassified as non-criminal deaths. But in most cases, crime is “disappeared” by the street officer who engages in “creative writing,” turning felonies into misdemeanors or non-crimes. (An additional crime statistic reduction strategy, “de-policing,” withdrawing police from embarrassing confrontation with criminals, is beyond the scope of this essay.)
It’s been going on for years:
On October 11, 1995, reporter William K. Rashbaum, then of the New York Daily News, published a memo he’d obtained from the 50th Precinct in The Bronx. The memo, by precinct commander, Capt. Anthony Kissik, instructed officers in the art of defining down crimes from felonies to misdemeanors or even non-crimes (e.g., a felony assault would be changed to a misdemeanor case of “harassment.”)
On January 29, 1996, Newsday’s Leonard Levitt reported on two rapes, one murder, and one fatal shooting of a car thief by a police officer (which was eventually counted as a homicide) from the previous December, none of which had been reported by the NYPD. The NYPD brass insisted (get this!) that a mysterious, unnamed reporter had stolen the crime reports. Levitt found out about the incidents from relatives of the victims.
On October 29, 1996, Captain Louis Vega, commander of the 41st Precinct in the South Bronx, was suspended without pay in a crime statistic fraud scandal. The Daily News quoted a stationhouse source as saying, “in any precinct you could go in and come up with complaints where the charges should be higher. There is tremendous pressure on precinct commanders to produce lower numbers.” Captain Vega’s mistake was apparently in violating the first law of lying: Plausibility. Crime was allegedly down 14% in the South Bronx overall from Jan. 1 to October 20, 1996 compared to the same period in 1995. But Vega reported a 40% crime reduction in his precinct.
On January 1998, the NYPD’s Transit Bureau was caught fudging violent crime stats. Bureau Chief William Donoghue was forced to resign. NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir, apparently a master of fuzzy math, insisted that the fraudulent underreporting of subway crime by 20 percent did not affect the NYPD’s overall crime statistics: "While a true portrait of citywide crime was being painted, a somewhat skewed picture of crime in the subway was being put forth."
There’s been a distinct political pattern to news stories on the underreporting of crime. In the 1990s, these stories were almost always published in the far-left Newsday or centrist Democrat Daily News. Apparently, the neoconservative New York Post so closely identified with Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoralty (1994-2001) that it could not stomach such reporting. Conversely, the left-Democrat New York Times had a consuming hatred of Giuliani, but was too lazy for the gumshoe work.
But on February 4, 1999 Amadou Diallo, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, Africa, was tragically gunned down in the Soundview section of The Bronx by four white NYPD officers from the city’s (since disbanded) elite Street Crimes Unit. The detectives were searching for Isaac Jones, the worst serial rapist in the city’s history, who lived in the same neighborhood, and whose predations had caused hysteria in The Bronx. Diallo resembled the description of Jones. But once Diallo lay dead, the frenzied demands to bring in the rapist were forgotten.
As were the stories on fraudulent NYPD record-keeping.
By Nicholas Stix
“The news for New York City is spectacular," New York’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a City Hall press conference on Monday. He and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly [Email him] were claiming credit for new FBI crime stats showing major crimes—murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, car theft, larceny and arson—dropping 5.8% in the city in 2003. New York’s crime rate now ranks it 211th of the 230 U.S. cities with 100,000-plus population—behind Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas.
Unfortunately, there must have been at least one skeptic at the press conference. Hizzoner reportedly “bristled” at suggestions that the city's crime stats are being driven down artificially by numbers-fudging police commanders.
“‘C’mon,” Bloomberg snapped. “It is just not the case. ‘” [Our incredible shrinking crime rate, by David Saltonstall, New York Daily News, May 25, 2004]
Well, I am a skeptic. I say: sure, it’s the case! Because I’ve seen it.
Some reporters – most notably Leonard Levitt of Newsday—have intermittently written on crimes that have been “disappeared” in New York by creative police reporting. But to my knowledge, I am the only journalist actually to have been at the scene of one.
It occurred on December 8, 1995—when New York’s crime decline had been supposedly underway for some five years. At about 10:30 p.m., on a Queens-bound A train, a man ended an argument with two brothers by shooting one of them. Then he exited at Kingston-Throop station, in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Riding two cars away, I neither saw nor heard the shooting. However, I interviewed a witness, saw the 20-something black victim on a gurney doing a convincing impression of a corpse, his inconsolable, raging (and apparently twin) brother accompanying him, and two emergency medical technicians wheeling away the gurney.
Since the train was a crime scene, we passengers had to exit it and the station, walk through “Bed-Stuy” to the Manhattan-bound local station, take a train three stops, and then turn around on a Queens-bound train that skipped the crime scene station.
It took me over three hours to get home that night.
In the subway below and on the street above, I counted no less than 39 police officers of every rank—an extraordinary response.
The huge response was because, approximately 12 hours earlier, a black supremacist named Roland Smith Jr. a.k.a. Abubunde Mulocko, had entered Jewish-owned Freddie’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, which was besieged by a racist “boycott,” yelled “It’s on!,” and ordered all customers to leave. In what became known as the Harlem Massacre, Smith proceeded to shoot four people, set the store ablaze, murder seven (non-white) store employees, and commit suicide.
That made for at least five shootings on December 8.
A few weeks later, I asked NYPD press rep Officer Kathie Kelly if there had been any shootings on December 8. She told me she’d get back to me.
Later, she informed me: “There were no shootings on the eighth.”
Since 1991, I have fought off at least eight racial attacks, including two attempted muggings. All were “disappeared” by police or prosecutors—even when I had bloody wounds; when the police had been called to the scene by a subway motorman or (unbeknownst to me) an anonymous witness who corroborated my depiction of events; or when the attack took place on camera, in front of a black postal police officer. (In 1994, a black New Jersey bus driver who had recently fled Brooklyn, suggested that. in New York, crime victims require legal representation no less than defendants, if they wish their cases prosecuted.)
And the fudging of crime statistics is not just a story in the Naked City.
On October 23, 2003, five New Orleans police officers—including First District captain, Norvel Orazio, a 29-year veteran, who had won awards for reducing crime—were fired, and a sixth was demoted, for improperly downgrading crime complaints so that they would not show up in crime statistics.
On February 20, an audit of Atlanta’s police records showed that the suppression and loss of crime records was endemic for many years, with 22,000 police reports of 911 calls disappearing in 2002 alone.
Similar mini-scandals have also occurred in recent years in Philadelphia and Boca Raton, Florida.
Urban police departments have for years been under intense pressure to reduce violent crime. But blacks and Hispanics have a virtual monopoly over urban violent crime. (In New York City in 1998, 89.2 percent of suspects in violent crimes were black or Hispanic.) And police officials dare not offend outraged black and Hispanic criminals, or their supporters in the media and in politics who constantly invent “racial profiling” hoaxes.
The police’s job is impossible. And so, instead of policing hoodlums, today’s modern, urban police managers aggressively police ... impressions. The “disappearing” of crime is one of their leading impression management methods.
Critics may counter: “So what are you saying, they’re hiding bodies?!”
Not at all. Keep in mind: most crime reporters do not ride late at night in subway cars to observe crime firsthand, drive through city streets listening to police scanners and racing to crime scenes, or take inventory at city morgues. They are more likely to ride through the city in taxicabs. Many seem to know—or want to know—only why police officials deign to tell them. And these officials simply refuse to report many violent felonies.
Detectives engage in the wholesale “unfounding” of crimes i.e. determine that allegation were “unfounded.” And murders are reclassified as non-criminal deaths. But in most cases, crime is “disappeared” by the street officer who engages in “creative writing,” turning felonies into misdemeanors or non-crimes. (An additional crime statistic reduction strategy, “de-policing,” withdrawing police from embarrassing confrontation with criminals, is beyond the scope of this essay.)
It’s been going on for years:
On October 11, 1995, reporter William K. Rashbaum, then of the New York Daily News, published a memo he’d obtained from the 50th Precinct in The Bronx. The memo, by precinct commander, Capt. Anthony Kissik, instructed officers in the art of defining down crimes from felonies to misdemeanors or even non-crimes (e.g., a felony assault would be changed to a misdemeanor case of “harassment.”)
On January 29, 1996, Newsday’s Leonard Levitt reported on two rapes, one murder, and one fatal shooting of a car thief by a police officer (which was eventually counted as a homicide) from the previous December, none of which had been reported by the NYPD. The NYPD brass insisted (get this!) that a mysterious, unnamed reporter had stolen the crime reports. Levitt found out about the incidents from relatives of the victims.
On October 29, 1996, Captain Louis Vega, commander of the 41st Precinct in the South Bronx, was suspended without pay in a crime statistic fraud scandal. The Daily News quoted a stationhouse source as saying, “in any precinct you could go in and come up with complaints where the charges should be higher. There is tremendous pressure on precinct commanders to produce lower numbers.” Captain Vega’s mistake was apparently in violating the first law of lying: Plausibility. Crime was allegedly down 14% in the South Bronx overall from Jan. 1 to October 20, 1996 compared to the same period in 1995. But Vega reported a 40% crime reduction in his precinct.
On January 1998, the NYPD’s Transit Bureau was caught fudging violent crime stats. Bureau Chief William Donoghue was forced to resign. NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir, apparently a master of fuzzy math, insisted that the fraudulent underreporting of subway crime by 20 percent did not affect the NYPD’s overall crime statistics: "While a true portrait of citywide crime was being painted, a somewhat skewed picture of crime in the subway was being put forth."
There’s been a distinct political pattern to news stories on the underreporting of crime. In the 1990s, these stories were almost always published in the far-left Newsday or centrist Democrat Daily News. Apparently, the neoconservative New York Post so closely identified with Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoralty (1994-2001) that it could not stomach such reporting. Conversely, the left-Democrat New York Times had a consuming hatred of Giuliani, but was too lazy for the gumshoe work.
But on February 4, 1999 Amadou Diallo, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, Africa, was tragically gunned down in the Soundview section of The Bronx by four white NYPD officers from the city’s (since disbanded) elite Street Crimes Unit. The detectives were searching for Isaac Jones, the worst serial rapist in the city’s history, who lived in the same neighborhood, and whose predations had caused hysteria in The Bronx. Diallo resembled the description of Jones. But once Diallo lay dead, the frenzied demands to bring in the rapist were forgotten.
As were the stories on fraudulent NYPD record-keeping.