June 20, 2003

West Side Crime Statistics Were Softened, Police Say

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

More than 200 crimes reported last year in Chelsea and on the western edge of Midtown, mostly thefts and robberies, were improperly downgraded in police statistics to misdemeanors, making that area seem safer on paper than it really was, police officials said yesterday.

The 203 downgraded crimes, equivalent to about a quarter of all felonies recorded in the area in 2002, were reclassified as felonies after the statistical improprieties were uncovered during a six-month department investigation, officials said.

Because the reported crimes were wrongly downgraded, the 10th Precinct, which covers Chelsea, part of Hell's Kitchen and the lower western edge of Midtown, recorded just 811 serious crimes at the end of 2002, compared with 876 in 2001, for a 7.42 percent drop, according to police statistics. Without the changes, serious crime in the precinct would show an increase for 2002 of about 16 percent, to more than 1,000 crimes, while the city over all had a modest decrease of 5.32 percent, according to department statistics.

So far this year, statistics show that overall crime in the precinct is up 44.7 percent, with robberies up 22.2 percent and grand larcenies up 86.2 percent.

The investigation into the crime reporting practices in the 10th Precinct is one of two continuing inquiries by the department, several officials said. The other focuses on the crime statistics in Police Service Area 7, a police command in the Bronx that patrols housing projects in part of the borough, according to one police official, but that inquiry began just recently and the outcome is as yet unclear.

The investigation of the 10th Precinct has focused on its former commander and a sergeant who earned more than 1,000 hours of overtime while handling the precinct's statistics and apparently downgrading the felony crimes, officials said. Several officers told investigators they had been transferred because they objected to felonies being downgraded, according to one official.

The inquiries come as the department, which has lost 4,000 officers in the city's fiscal crisis despite its new counterterrorism responsibilities, tries to keep the crime rate down in New York, even while it inches up in cities around the country. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly frequently cites the declining crime figures as evidence of the department's ability to keep the city's streets safe, and the department's data-driven policing has been imitated around the country.

Because the department will continue to be judged in large measure by its ability to keep crime down, some critics contend that commanders, who have already presided over record crime declines in their precincts, feel unrelenting pressure to keep rates low, pressure that can lead them to shave numbers.

But Michael P. O'Looney, the department's chief spokesman, said the improprieties were an aberration and that the additional 203 felonies would have a minuscule effect on the overall 2002 Compstat numbers -- a total of 153,379 serious crimes reported citywide -- and on the F.B.I. uniform crime report numbers for 2002, reported this week. Those figures have not yet been adjusted.

He defended the integrity of the department's statistics and its vaunted Compstat system, which was devised to track crime trends around the city carefully so the police can better deploy officers. Mr. O'Looney said the department aggressively audits precinct statistics on a regular basis. He also said the department's error rate in classifying crimes has dropped from 4.1 percent in the second half of 2001 to 1.9 percent for the first half of this year.

''This investigation involves the misclassification of 203 reports out of the more than one and a half million reports that are filed each year,'' he said. ''The number is so small that it has no impact on the citywide Compstat crime statistics, and the citywide misclassification rate has steadily declined in recent years.''

The Compstat system, one of the primary tools credited with helping to bring crime down over the past decade, and the statistics it produces are also the foundation on which the city bases its measure of its residents' safety. Its figures are often cited by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly as proof that New York is the nation's safest big city.

Since the system was put in place in 1994, at least five police commanders have been accused of reclassifying crimes to improve their statistics, which are reviewed at sometimes contentious weekly Compstat meetings. There, commanders are grilled about the strategies they are using to focus on particular crime problems in their commands. As crime has continued to decline, with murder rates falling to levels not seen since the 1960's, some commanders say they feel they have exhausted almost every strategy to reduce crime further.

A number of police officers who complained about crimes being downgraded in the 10th Precinct were questioned in the investigation, which focused on the former commander, Capt. Dominic A. Gentile, who is now the commander of the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn, and the sergeant who prepared his Compstat reports, several officials said. The sergeant, identified by police officials as Bruce Golden, retired in January, and investigators from the department's Internal Affairs Bureau, which is conducting the inquiry with the Quality Assurance Division, have been unable to find him, a senior police official said.

Capt. John F. Driscoll, president of the Captains Endowment Association, the police captains' union, defended Captain Gentile, saying two or three previous audits of the 10th Precinct's statistics performed by the department's Quality Assurance Division had uncovered no irregularities. He said there were procedures in place in every precinct to have reports reviewed by others, including a sergeant and the commander.

''It takes close supervision,'' he said. ''If occasionally the commanding officer is not looking closely, occasionally changes may be made that he is not aware of, but on the whole, C.O.'s have the highest integrity and are doing their best to see that all crimes are properly recorded and are in the right classification.''