One theme of The Wire, a series about the war on drugs in Baltimore, is the willingness of police department leaders to fake crime statistics.
Despite a few flights of fancy, the drama prided itself on its realism. It turns out that in reality, too, police department bosses may be willing to rewrite crime statistics so things don’t seem as bad as they are.
In Washington DC, a police sergeant, Charlotte Djossou, accused higher-up officers of repeatedly instructing lower-down officers to re-label everything from thefts to violent assaults as lesser offenses. All liberally confirmed by “[Metropolitan Police Department] emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts” seen by The Washington Free Beacon.
The MPD has now settled with Djossou, who sued the department in 2020 after it punished her for bringing the matter up.
One example that emerged in the legal proceedings is a 2022 deposition by Randy Griffen, an MPD commander. Griffen admits telling a police captain, Franklin Porter, to find “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics.” The solution was to recategorize instances of shoplifting and theft, now calling them “Taking Property Without Right” — “because TPWOR reports are not tracked in the DC Crime Report.”
The Free Beacon quotes extensively from court documents. Tweaking the crime stats was routine in DC for years.
The DC Police are not alone: other fictionalizers of crime statistics are known to have flourished in LA, NYC, New Orleans, and Columbus, Ohio.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “The Case of the Phony Stats”
Statistics often seem more tools of propaganda than of rational thought and discourse.
We have long lived in a world in which statistics have been falsified, and in which statistics assembled and calculated with very different methods (eg, infant mortality) have been treated as-if simply and directly comparable. Some statistics, such as figures for aggregate economic activity, for price-inflation, or for unemployment, simply cannot be better than heuristics, even if calculated as well as one might. Others, such as the consumer-confidence statistic, are very simply garbage.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” — commonly attributed to Mark Twain,
Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, but I’ve not seen the attribution substantiated.
The Ministry of Truth.
Because controlling what’s reported and shaping public perception is cheaper than actually addressing the problem, as well as supporting the otherwise undermined narrative.
Doesn’t matter who votes, only who counts the votes._Stalin
awmakers downgrade felonies to misdemeanors. Some are deemed so minor as to not be worth reporting. Actual crime numbers and law enforcement successes and failures have become I would now call ‘an inconvenient truth’.