The FBI's crime reporting program used by police chiefs & politicians is deeply flawed & almost never audited.
The FBI's crime reporting program is considered the final word on crime trends in the United States, but the agency rarely audits police agencies providing the information and when it does its reviews are too cursory to identify deep flaws.
In each of the past five years, FBI auditors have reviewed crime statistics at less than 1% of the roughly 17,000 departments that report data, a Journal Sentinel examination of FBI records has found. In all, they've audited as many as 652 police agencies during that time, or less than 4% of the total.
And a Journal Sentinel survey of police departments in the 30 largest U.S. cities found that nearly two-thirds have not been audited in the past five years.
Of those, six departments - including Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Seattle - have never been reviewed by the FBI since the auditing program began 15 years ago.
That lack of scrutiny allows cases of undercounting of crimes, such as in Milwaukee where thousands of violent assaults were not included in the crime rate since 2006, to go unnoticed and gives the public a false sense of the true level of crime, criminal justice experts said.
"It would be more candid to not do any (audits)," said Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "This way, at least you're not offering any pretense of checking on the validity of the stats. If you are going to do that little, then why do it? You either do it systematically, or you don't do it at all."
A Journal Sentinel investigation in May found more than 500 serious assaults - including stabbings and beatings - over a recent three-year period had been misreported as minor crimes. Another 800 assaults followed the same pattern. Those findings came from a partial review that compared Milwaukee police crime data with nearly 60,000 cases referred to prosecutors from 2009 to early 2012.
After the Journal Sentinel story, the Police Department launched its own targeted review of more than 34,000 cases, and in June released an initial audit report that showed police underreported more than 5,300 aggravated assaults since 2006.
FBI crime data is often cited by police chiefs and elected officials to give residents a measure of safety in their communities. In Milwaukee, Flynn and Mayor Tom Barrett have touted four straight years of declining crime.
But the information receives little outside scrutiny and is susceptible to manipulation by local police departments, Silverman said of the overall system.
"Crime data is a tool that politicians and police leaders use, yet the system is so incentivized to cast a favorable light and there is very little checks and balances to make sure it's accurate," he said.
Faulty crime data has far greater implications than just numbers on a spreadsheet, said John Eterno, director of the graduate criminal justice program at Molloy College in Long Island, N.Y. For example, police departments use the statistics to develop crime-fighting strategies and make hiring decisions.
"If you're saying your crime numbers are really low, but meanwhile they are really high and you aren't hiring cops, you are going to exacerbate the problem of criminality," Eterno said. "You need to have the correct numbers to do the right thing."
Eterno and Silverman have studied crime reporting practices at the New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies. Their research has identified widespread problems with performance management systems, most notably CompStat, which is a tool used by Milwaukee police and hundreds of other police departments across the country.
CompStat is used to hold police commanders accountable for crime trends in their districts - they must answer to the police chief and high-ranking officials at monthly meetings about performance metrics such as arrests, traffic stops and crime figures.
Without more robust oversight by FBI auditors, the crime numbers are only as good as a law enforcement agency's efforts. Therefore, experts said, police departments must scour their own data to ensure accuracy.
When the original Journal Sentinel investigation in May identified hundreds of violent assaults that were misreported, Police Chief Edward Flynn said that - along with a dysfunctional computer system - sergeants and lieutenants failed to catch mistakes on FBI crime classifications when reviewing reports.
Several weeks later, Deputy Inspector William Jessup told a reporter that records clerks were not properly trained on FBI protocols and were routinely changing weapon codes to allow violent attacks to be incorrectly reported as minor assaults.
Flynn and other police officials have also said the department's roughly 1,300 police officers were never trained on FBI crime coding because they are focused on solving crimes and making arrests. Instead, officers were taught to accept the default FBI crime codes that pop up when they fill out incident reports on a computer.
In late June, Flynn ordered nearly 70 members from more than 20 police sections to attend two full days of introductory training on compliance with crime reporting procedures. The training is being held this week at State Fair Park in West Allis.
The Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission plans to hire an outside consultant at a cost of roughly $25,000 to audit the Police Department's computer system and its business practices. Meanwhile, Milwaukee police are also conducting a comprehensive internal review of crime data from other crime categories and said they will release the results in the fall.
In addition to conducting internal audits, another way police departments can achieve accurate crime reporting is through "integrity testing," Eterno said. An example of that: An undercover police officer pretends to be the victim of an aggravated assault and then auditors see if the incident was properly coded for FBI purposes.
"I think any criminologist would like to see a better system of auditing crime," Eterno said. "It's a voluntary system, so you are just counting on these local departments to do something. The local departments need to do far better audits than what most are doing."
http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/fbi-crimereporting-audits-are-shallow-infrequent-cg5uvel-166665516.html
Can FBI crime statistics really be trusted?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is supposed to be the authority on crime statistics. But the FBI’s numbers are only as good as those provided by local law enforcement, and apparently the bureau hasn’t been verifying what police file with Washington.
Of the 17,000 law enforcement departments that send in crime numbers, less than 1% have been audited by the FBI over the last five years, according to an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Among the 30 largest cities’ police departments, nearly two-thirds have not been audited since 2007.In the case of departments in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Seattle, Memphis, El Paso and Austin, the FBI has never audited these reports since the bureau began reviewing crime statistics 15 years ago.
“That lack of scrutiny allows cases of undercounting of crimes, such as in Milwaukee where thousands of violent assaults were not included in the crime rate since 2006, to go unnoticed and gives the public a false sense of the true level of crime,” wrote Ben Poston in the Journal Sentinel. http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/Can_FBI_Crime_Statistics_Really_be_Trusted_120821
Milwaukee police lowered crime rate…by misreporting violent assaults.
http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/Milwaukee_Police_Lowered_Crime_Rate__by_Misreporting_Violent_Assaults_120524