by P.D. Lesko

IN ANSWER TO how often the officers on Ann Arbor’s police department simply skip the step of filing official police reports, a source within the AAPD said: “Probably four times per month and all of the officers are doing this. We are just stretched so thin.”

Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje has a mantra, and it’s “Crime is down.” Hieftje has used “crime is down” to justify cutting the number of police officers. He has used “Crime is down” to convince taxpayers that they are just as safe as they were when the city had 100 more officers. Like George W. Bush, whose mantra was “there were weapons of mass destruction,” AAPD sources say that Hieftje’s mantra is a lie that is putting the citizens whom they have sworn to protect at a higher risk of being victimized.

The Uniform Crime Reports compiled and then released by the FBI are drawn from information submitted by individual cities. In essence, the FBI rely on self-reporting and the honor system. Elected officials and police chiefs who want to manipulate crime statistics can do it several ways, and members of the Ann Arbor Police Department allege that Ann Arbor’s department is doing just that, misrepresenting crime statistics to make it appear as though crime in our city is down from when the Department had 100 more officers.

It is a serious allegation, as false information fed to the federal officials could open up local officials in a city or its police department to serious scrutiny from federal officials and, perhaps, charges of public corruption. The Obama administration has made quite clear that it takes charges of local and state governmental corruption and fraud quite seriously.

On the FBI’s website the page is titled Public Corruption. The first sentence reads, “It’s our top priority among criminal investigations—and for good reason.” The explanation continues, “Public corruption poses a fundamental threat to our national security and way of life. It impacts everything from how well our borders are secured and our neighborhoods protected…to verdicts handed down in courts…to the quality of our roads, schools, and other government services. And it takes a significant toll on our pocketbooks, wasting billions in tax dollars every year. The FBI is singularly situated to combat this corruption, with the skills and capabilities to run complex undercover operations and surveillance.”

The FBI is currently investigating more than 2,000 public corruption cases around the country. In fiscal 2010, FBI corruption investigations led to charges in more than 1,330 cases, resulting in more than 900 convictions. A large number of those convictions were politicos in local government.

“There are not enough officers to file reports the same way that officers who worked in the AAPD five years ago filed reports,” another source within the AAPD, who spoke on condition of anonymity explained. “The next call is waiting.”

There are other ways that the multiple sources within the department allege Ann Arbor’s crime statistics are being manipulated so that it appears crime has dropped even as the number of officers has been steadily reduced.

“Say a call comes in to 911. The dispatch takes the call, writes it up—classifies it—and dispatches officers. A & B (assault and battery) becomes disorderly conduct. Open calls get closed out then reclassified.”

In response to whether the dispatchers are down-classifying 911 calls through ineptitude or in an effort to deliberately keep the numbers of violent crimes perpetrated low, the AAPD source answers quickly: “Both, I think.”

Then there are the case closures.

The AAPD source explains why focusing on the number of crimes committed is a sly trick.

“What’s the closure rate? That’s the question citizens want to have answered. The truth is that the detectives know that they don’t have enough time to investigate some cases. They make a couple of calls, then close the case. When cases are closed, they are classified as a particular kind of crime, then the file is locked.”

Rana Sampson is a national problem-oriented policing consultant and the former director of public safety for the University of San Diego. She was previously a White House Fellow; National Institute of Justice Fellow; senior researcher and trainer at the Police Executive Research Forum; attorney; and patrol officer, undercover narcotics officer and patrol sergeant with the New York City Police Department. In the April 2011 issue of Community Policing Dispatch, she writes about the misclassification of crimes by police departments and police chiefs:

Even though there are many different ways to measure a city’s crime reduction success, the up or down trends of Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Part 1 crime numbers and rates has the firmest grip on how cities are viewed, even though these numbers/rates are widely considered to be insufficient and potentially inaccurate gauges of police competency. That said, I do believe we can reduce crime—and have done so in many places—but the important point here, is that there is no need to exaggerate gains since it masks patterns that allow us to reduce crime further. Currently, most police agencies selectively report crime in their jurisdiction, typically reporting on only a handful of crimes, predominantly murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft, whether or not these are indicative of all the other crimes or crime trends occurring in the jurisdiction. Also, police rarely report crime clearance rates to the public and do not discuss how these rates relate to reductions or changes in crime.

In Ann Arbor, Part 1 crime is the star of the Hieftje show, as opposed to the crime clearance rates, as the AAPD source points out above. There are no regular internal or external audits conducted by the AAPD to ferret out the misclassification rate, as there are in, say, New York, where a team reviews 50,000 crime reports per year to sniff out down-classifications and misclassifications of crime in that city.

If, as the AAPD sources allege, the number of crimes reported has fallen because AAPD officers are not writing crime reports, repeated claims that the number of crimes committed is down can only be seen as a perverse misrepresentation. Furthermore, if the crimes that are being reported get misclassified, as multiple AAPD sources allege, it means that serious crime in Ann Arbor has, perhaps, not declined steadily as claimed—claims repeatedly parroted by the local media.