I-Team: Some Baltimore Crimes Unrecorded
Hamm: If Witnesses Don't Cooperate, Crime Can't Be Recorded
POSTED: 6:15 pm EST February 13, 2006
UPDATED: 7:04 pm EST February 13, 2006
BALTIMORE -- The WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team uncovered an unwritten trail of crimes in Baltimore that aren't part of the record of the city's crime toll -- and these aren't cases that simply slipped through the cracks.
WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller reported it's hard to know exactly how many cases get written off without an audit of hundreds of thousands of calls to 911 and 311.
But Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm suggested the 11 News I-Team's examples may not be isolated.
One morning last September, a Baltimore resident, who chose not to be identified, woke up to find her window screen cut and her purse, which she had left on the kitchen counter, gone. She had left the kitchen window open the night before.
"I felt really violated because I know it happened sometime in the middle of the night," the woman said. "It just appeared my purse had been stolen through the window."
The woman dialed 311 to notify police. By the time two officers arrived, she said, her bank and credit card company had alerted her of attempts to use her credit card and ATM card.
But the officers, she said, did little to investigate or make a record of what might have happened.
"The officer who was driving the car said, 'Well, it looks like suspicious activity. Actually, we can't prove it was a break-in, it's just suspicious activity.
The I-Team discovered officers did not write a police report in the case of a south Baltimore shooting. Instead, they lumped it in with an armed robbery.
"Could police see that the screen was cut?" Miller asked.
"Yes, it was flopping in the wind," the woman said.
"Did they make any attempt to fingerprint the window?" Miller asked.
"No, they didn't take a report, they basically said get a big dog. That's what they told me -- get a big dog. ... And left," the woman said.
911 Calls About Gunfire In Cherry Hill
One afternoon last October, several passing motorists called 911 to report trouble outside a shopping center in Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighborhood.
911 Call
Caller: "There's a gunfight at the Cherry Hill Shopping Center."
Operator: "Oh, OK. Does he see any weapons, any weapons?"
Caller: "I don't know, I'm not sticking around to find out."
Moments later, 911 received three more calls, these from emergency room staff at Harbor Hospital.
911 Call
"I have a couple of victims of assault, one of them is probably a gunshot wound. ... One of them, for sure, is a gunshot victim. One of them has probably been cut by something, but they're all together."
Figuring the assault victims had been involved in the fight, police went to the hospital, sized up the injuries and the nature of the crime, Miller said.
Officer
"It appears to be an aggravated assault with some type of weapon. It doesn't look like it, if it is, it's a small cart, but if it isn't, it might be a BB gun."
They then asked for an incident number, which creates the record that a crime has occurred.
Police Radio
Officer: "I need an X-ray number for an aggravated assault."
Dispatcher: "Make your number 16521."
Officer: "And it wasn't a cutting either, he was beat with an object.
Less than a minute and half later, without explanation, the officer made a different request that turned the incident into no crime at all.
Police Radio
Officer: "You can make that X-ray you just gave me for the (aggravated) assault, just make it unfounded."
Dispatcher: "To make it unfounded?"
Officer: "Yeah."
Dispatcher: "10-4."
Commissioner Leonard Hamm defended his officers, saying witnesses to the reported crimes refused to cooperate. Thus, the officers deemed the calls unfounded.
Police Officials React
Doug Ward, a retired Maryland State Police commander who spent years overseeing crime reporting by local departments, now teaches police leadership at Johns Hopkins University.
"From what we do here there, it certainly raises a lot of questions in my mind," Ward said. "It's highly unusual to say it's unfounded when you have a victim in the hospital with an injury. Put it that way, it's highly unusual."
Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm said the officers were right to make no report of the Cherry Hill incident because the victims wouldn't cooperate.
"They didn't want to talk about anything," Hamm said. "We found witnesses who were involved in a fight who refused to talk to us, they wouldn't give us their names."
Hamm said the same thing happens in other cases.
"So, let me clear about this, if your officers get there and the victims don't want to cooperate, the officers have the right to simply say this in unfounded?" Miller asked.
"In some cases, yes," Hamm said.
"Therefore, that does not get counted as an incident, correct?" Miller asked.
"It gets counted as a call for service for the officer, but no, we don't count that as a common assault incident," Hamm said.
"Or a crime?" Miller asked.
"Because it can't be proven that it was a crime," Hamm said.
"What if one of these two guys died three days later?" Miller asked.
"What if they had died three days later? Then, we would have initiated an investigation. But they didn't" die, Hamm said.
"Do you know?" Miller asked.
"I beg your pardon?" Hamm replied.
"Do you know?" Miller asked.
"That they died?" Hamm replied. "Do you know?"
"I don't know, I'm asking you," Miller said.
"I don't know either, I don't know either," Hamm said.
911 Callers Report Gunfire
One night last November, nearly a dozen calls were made to 911 concerning a shooting on a south Baltimore corner.
911 Call
Caller: "Police, right now, somebody's firing a gun on Light and Heath street."
Operator: "How many gunshots did you hear?"
Caller: "Six."
Police responded and located the intended target of the gunman: a man who wasn't hurt. The incident would seem to fit the definition of an aggravated assault.
According to federal crime reporting guidelines, such an assault includes an unlawful attack accompanied by the use of a weapon for the purpose of inflicting severe injury. The guidelines make clear it is not necessary that injury result for an aggravated assault to occur.
But in fact, Miller reported, police wrote no report at all of the south Baltimore shooting. Instead, officers lumped it in with an armed robbery that had occurred earlier that night a couple of blocks away.
Police Radio
Officer: "These are all in reference to the one call, sir."
"That's not unusual," Hamm said.
The commissioner said officers do combine one incident with another in a practice called duplicating.
"How often does one incident get duplicated to another incident?" Miller asked.
"What we believe, once we go out to the scene is that they may be related," Hamm said.
"Do you know, to this moment, that they were related?" Miller asked.
"No, I don't know to this moment that they were related," Hamm said.
So, instead of two crimes that night in south Baltimore, just one was written up, and the report on the robbery makes no mention of the shooting.
Ward, the former state police commander, said the importance of accurate crime reporting cannot be understated.
"Without those reports, you can't connect suspects to different crimes. It's the fundamental foundation of how we operate in policing in this country," Ward said.
Follow-Up To Unreported Incidents
In the case of the woman's purse stolen, she did get a written police report two weeks later after being dismissed by the first officers who answered her call. The report came only after she complained to someone she knew in the police department.
"They did not make me feel safe," the woman said.
Hamm said one of the officers first involved in that burglary call has been disciplined.
In the south Baltimore shooting, the intended target told the 11 News I-Team there was no doubt the gunman was shooting at him.
And in the Cherry Hill fight, a source told the 11 News I-Team that the victims at the hospital did not object when told police would be called.
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/7020235/detail.html
Hamm: If Witnesses Don't Cooperate, Crime Can't Be Recorded
POSTED: 6:15 pm EST February 13, 2006
UPDATED: 7:04 pm EST February 13, 2006
BALTIMORE -- The WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team uncovered an unwritten trail of crimes in Baltimore that aren't part of the record of the city's crime toll -- and these aren't cases that simply slipped through the cracks.
WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller reported it's hard to know exactly how many cases get written off without an audit of hundreds of thousands of calls to 911 and 311.
But Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm suggested the 11 News I-Team's examples may not be isolated.
One morning last September, a Baltimore resident, who chose not to be identified, woke up to find her window screen cut and her purse, which she had left on the kitchen counter, gone. She had left the kitchen window open the night before.
"I felt really violated because I know it happened sometime in the middle of the night," the woman said. "It just appeared my purse had been stolen through the window."
The woman dialed 311 to notify police. By the time two officers arrived, she said, her bank and credit card company had alerted her of attempts to use her credit card and ATM card.
But the officers, she said, did little to investigate or make a record of what might have happened.
"The officer who was driving the car said, 'Well, it looks like suspicious activity. Actually, we can't prove it was a break-in, it's just suspicious activity.
The I-Team discovered officers did not write a police report in the case of a south Baltimore shooting. Instead, they lumped it in with an armed robbery.
"Could police see that the screen was cut?" Miller asked.
"Yes, it was flopping in the wind," the woman said.
"Did they make any attempt to fingerprint the window?" Miller asked.
"No, they didn't take a report, they basically said get a big dog. That's what they told me -- get a big dog. ... And left," the woman said.
911 Calls About Gunfire In Cherry Hill
One afternoon last October, several passing motorists called 911 to report trouble outside a shopping center in Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighborhood.
911 Call
Caller: "There's a gunfight at the Cherry Hill Shopping Center."
Operator: "Oh, OK. Does he see any weapons, any weapons?"
Caller: "I don't know, I'm not sticking around to find out."
Moments later, 911 received three more calls, these from emergency room staff at Harbor Hospital.
911 Call
"I have a couple of victims of assault, one of them is probably a gunshot wound. ... One of them, for sure, is a gunshot victim. One of them has probably been cut by something, but they're all together."
Figuring the assault victims had been involved in the fight, police went to the hospital, sized up the injuries and the nature of the crime, Miller said.
Officer
"It appears to be an aggravated assault with some type of weapon. It doesn't look like it, if it is, it's a small cart, but if it isn't, it might be a BB gun."
They then asked for an incident number, which creates the record that a crime has occurred.
Police Radio
Officer: "I need an X-ray number for an aggravated assault."
Dispatcher: "Make your number 16521."
Officer: "And it wasn't a cutting either, he was beat with an object.
Less than a minute and half later, without explanation, the officer made a different request that turned the incident into no crime at all.
Police Radio
Officer: "You can make that X-ray you just gave me for the (aggravated) assault, just make it unfounded."
Dispatcher: "To make it unfounded?"
Officer: "Yeah."
Dispatcher: "10-4."
Commissioner Leonard Hamm defended his officers, saying witnesses to the reported crimes refused to cooperate. Thus, the officers deemed the calls unfounded.
Police Officials React
Doug Ward, a retired Maryland State Police commander who spent years overseeing crime reporting by local departments, now teaches police leadership at Johns Hopkins University.
"From what we do here there, it certainly raises a lot of questions in my mind," Ward said. "It's highly unusual to say it's unfounded when you have a victim in the hospital with an injury. Put it that way, it's highly unusual."
Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm said the officers were right to make no report of the Cherry Hill incident because the victims wouldn't cooperate.
"They didn't want to talk about anything," Hamm said. "We found witnesses who were involved in a fight who refused to talk to us, they wouldn't give us their names."
Hamm said the same thing happens in other cases.
"So, let me clear about this, if your officers get there and the victims don't want to cooperate, the officers have the right to simply say this in unfounded?" Miller asked.
"In some cases, yes," Hamm said.
"Therefore, that does not get counted as an incident, correct?" Miller asked.
"It gets counted as a call for service for the officer, but no, we don't count that as a common assault incident," Hamm said.
"Or a crime?" Miller asked.
"Because it can't be proven that it was a crime," Hamm said.
"What if one of these two guys died three days later?" Miller asked.
"What if they had died three days later? Then, we would have initiated an investigation. But they didn't" die, Hamm said.
"Do you know?" Miller asked.
"I beg your pardon?" Hamm replied.
"Do you know?" Miller asked.
"That they died?" Hamm replied. "Do you know?"
"I don't know, I'm asking you," Miller said.
"I don't know either, I don't know either," Hamm said.
911 Callers Report Gunfire
One night last November, nearly a dozen calls were made to 911 concerning a shooting on a south Baltimore corner.
911 Call
Caller: "Police, right now, somebody's firing a gun on Light and Heath street."
Operator: "How many gunshots did you hear?"
Caller: "Six."
Police responded and located the intended target of the gunman: a man who wasn't hurt. The incident would seem to fit the definition of an aggravated assault.
According to federal crime reporting guidelines, such an assault includes an unlawful attack accompanied by the use of a weapon for the purpose of inflicting severe injury. The guidelines make clear it is not necessary that injury result for an aggravated assault to occur.
But in fact, Miller reported, police wrote no report at all of the south Baltimore shooting. Instead, officers lumped it in with an armed robbery that had occurred earlier that night a couple of blocks away.
Police Radio
Officer: "These are all in reference to the one call, sir."
"That's not unusual," Hamm said.
The commissioner said officers do combine one incident with another in a practice called duplicating.
"How often does one incident get duplicated to another incident?" Miller asked.
"What we believe, once we go out to the scene is that they may be related," Hamm said.
"Do you know, to this moment, that they were related?" Miller asked.
"No, I don't know to this moment that they were related," Hamm said.
So, instead of two crimes that night in south Baltimore, just one was written up, and the report on the robbery makes no mention of the shooting.
Ward, the former state police commander, said the importance of accurate crime reporting cannot be understated.
"Without those reports, you can't connect suspects to different crimes. It's the fundamental foundation of how we operate in policing in this country," Ward said.
Follow-Up To Unreported Incidents
In the case of the woman's purse stolen, she did get a written police report two weeks later after being dismissed by the first officers who answered her call. The report came only after she complained to someone she knew in the police department.
"They did not make me feel safe," the woman said.
Hamm said one of the officers first involved in that burglary call has been disciplined.
In the south Baltimore shooting, the intended target told the 11 News I-Team there was no doubt the gunman was shooting at him.
And in the Cherry Hill fight, a source told the 11 News I-Team that the victims at the hospital did not object when told police would be called.
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/7020235/detail.html