by Patricia Lesko

Ann Arbor recently passed Detroit as the city with the highest assessed value in the state. In the realm of public safety, however, while the number of violent crimes and property crimes in Detroit have fallen, in Ann Arbor the number of crimes reported against both people and property have risen since 2014. The most recent statistical data published by the Michigan State Police reveal that in Ann Arbor more crimes are being reported, including violent crimes. Data also show that fewer of those cases are being cleared (arrest/identify a suspect), but clearance rate data can be influenced by a number of factors. The total number of crimes reported by the AAPD rose from 6,220 in 2014 to 6,714 in 2015—a level not seen since 2012, when Barnett Jones was Chief of Police and 6,796 crimes were reported. In 2012, the clearance rate of the AAPD was 30 percent. In 2015, the AAPD’s clearance rate was 37 percent, down slightly from 39 percent in 2014.

The Ann Arbor Independent reported in 2014 on the AAPD’s clearance rates and the number of uncleared crimes reported since 2012.

The rise in number of crimes reported, including violent crime, was not mentioned in a July 2015 MLive interview with former Chief John Seto prior his retirement. Chief Seto told a reporter: “Crime dropping is something that’s occurring across the county. It’s not just Ann Arbor. So, we’ve been fortunate to have the crime rates drop.” FBI crime statistics show that the number of violent crimes and property crimes reported across the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past 25 years.

Number of Crimes Data

Since 2010, former Ann Arbor police chiefs as well as local elected officials in Ann Arbor have repeatedly assured residents that “crime is down,” referring to the number of crimes reported.

Unlike his predecessors, Ann Arbor’s current Police Chief James Baird has not appeared before Council in a public meeting or been quoted in the media on the subject of Ann Arbor’s crime rate. Baird was hired as interim chief in Aug. 2015 and confirmed as Chief of Police in Feb. 2016.

The AAPD doesn’t publish a daily, comprehensive police blotter or updated crime statistics on its own website. Though data are shared with the Crimemapping.com site. There, the public can browse the past six months of AAPD’s crimes reported data. The annual comprehensive crimes reported data compiled by the AAPD, uploaded to the Michigan State Police system and then made available by the Michigan State Police and the FBI are also datasets readily available to the general public and the media.

However, the accuracy of those data are influenced by a number of circumstances—some that are often not well understood  by the public and elected officials, and often under-reported by the media.

For instance, arrests of suspects whose crimes can’t be linked to them through evidence, and crimes reported whose victims subsequently decide not to speak to the police, go into the number of crimes reported which a policing agency has not cleared. If an individual were to rob a dozen homes and subsequently be arrested (for any reason other than the robberies), the robberies would be reflected in the policing agency’s “crime rate.” Unless the individual arrested could be charged with those dozen crimes, the public would see in the published crime rate data a spike in home invasions accompanied by a low clearance rate for that same category of crime.

These circumstances do not, however, refute AAPD insiders’ complaints that the “crimes reported” metric has been abused by local elected officials to justify cuts to police staffing—or in support of political priorities that require General Fund money. The “crime is down” explanation—based solely on the number of crimes reported—was used, for example, as the justification for an $8 million early retirement package offered to two dozen of the AAPDs most experienced officers in 2011/12. That shifted the cost of those officers away from the city’s General Fund to its underfunded retirement obligation. The resulting “savings” were spent, in part, on the Fuller Rd. train station project staff time, studies and consultants.

An AAPD insider shared another reason why focusing only on the number of crimes committed can be misleading.

“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.”

Charles Wellford, a professor of Criminology at the University of Maryland, suggests the rise nationally in the number of uncleared cases represents a shift in public policy that is not always understood by the public who may believe (or be led to believe) that police will investigate an armed robbery and the theft of a stereo system with equal attention and vigor.

Wellford says police have shifted priorities over the decades.

“In the 60s and 70s, no one thought that the police should be held responsible for how much crime there was,” Wellford says. “Back then,” he adds, “police focused on calls for service and solving crimes.”

In more recent years, he says, police have been pushed to focus more on prevention, which has taken precedence over solving crimes — especially non-violent offenses.

In Ann Arbor, however, our city’s police force does not have the staffing to focus on crime prevention, according to former Police Chiefs John Seto and Barnett Jones. In a July 2015 interview with MLive, Seto said: “More officers will give us more opportunity to do different things such as proactive policing and community engagement.”

In Ann Arbor, since 2012 police chiefs have admitted they don’t have adequate staffing to offer what numerous studies show the public finds most valuable from policing agencies: enhanced community policing, shorter response times and beat cops. The AAPD clearance rates (while perhaps artificially low and certainly impacted by circumstances such as the examples used above) while improved, are still low in comparison to other county policing agencies as well as national clearance rates.

Crime Stat Manipulations and “Metrics”

Ann Arbor Observer writer James Leonard, in a 2011 piece about crime in Ann Arbor writes, “When times are bad, conventional wisdom says, crime goes up. The idea is that desperate times can drive even law-abiding citizens to desperate crime. Not this time. During the worst economic downturn most people can remember, the number of crimes reported in Ann Arbor fell last year.”

Then Police Chief Barnett Jones, quoted by Leonard, says, “I’m happy to say, yes, in some categories, crime is down, but it’s also gone up in some others, so don’t get any sense of false hope….There were 216 sworn officers in 2000. There’re 124 now.”

The three AAPD insiders who spoke to The A2 Indy agreed that the city’s previous two police chiefs used the crimes reported data inappropriately when speaking to Council and the public.

“Those numbers can be misleading,” said one AAPD officer, “whether they’re used by a chief of police, a politician or by the media to draw conclusions about crime in a city.”

What AAPD officers interviewed do agree on is that fewer police on the streets results in fewer crimes being reported. The implication is clear: there are fewer police to report and investigate the crimes, not fewer crimes being committed.

• In 2000, according to data gathered by the Michigan State Police, the AAPD had 189 full-time officers and there were 9,525 crimes reported. The agency’s clearance rate in 2000 was calculated at 27 percent.

• In 2001, the AAPD had 170 full-time officers and crime reported dropped by over 1,000 incidents to 8,490.

• In 2006, the AAPD’s staffing had been further reduced to 155 full-time officers and total crimes reported dropped to 8,040.

Reducing the number of full-time AAPD officers by 34 over a six-year period corresponded to an overall 15 percent “drop in crime” based solely on the number of crimes reported.

“A majority on Council has taken the position that as long as serious crime (‘Part 1’ crime) is down, we don’t need additional police officers,” said Council member Jack Eaton (D-Ward 4).

Eaton, Council members Lumm (Independent-Ward 2) and Kailasapathy (D-Ward 1) have repeatedly pushed to allocate funds to increase the city’s police staffing. Their efforts have been voted down by a group of Council members who call for the use of “metrics” to determine appropriate police staffing. The metric to which they refer is the total number and types of crimes committed.

When he ran for City Council as a write-in candidate in 2013, Chip Smith (D-Ward 5) said in an interview: “As we look at City Services, we need to develop performance metrics that clearly show what the community is getting for its investment. For example, there has been a huge amount of discussion over the number of police officers we have in the City. As we make budget decisions about funding these positions, do we have data that shows these additional officers reduce violent crime or property crimes in the City?”

Likewise, Kirk Westphal (D-Ward 2) included this on his “issues” page when running for an open seat on City Council in 2014: “I am encouraged that the council agreed to use ‘outcome based’ metrics for budgeting for police, for example, which is one of the largest expenditures within the general fund.”

Julie Grand (D-Ward 3), when running for City Council in 2014, told MLive, “We need to think about how our police and firefighters are utilized. We need to think about metrics that clearly explain what we’re going to get when we add those police and fire safety officers,” she said. “Are we getting more safety when we add staff?”

“Some of the people elected to City Council just don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk about crime rates and police staffing,” said an AAPD officer.

Inimai M. Chettair is the director of the Justice Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center. His answer to the question of police staffing is unambiguous: “First, increasing numbers of police officers can reduce crime. Increased police in the 1990s brought down crime by about 5 percent (this could range from 0 to 10 percent). Police employment increased dramatically in the 1990s, rising 28 percent. One major contributor was the 1994 Crime Bill, which provided funding for 100,000 new local officers. A body of empirical research has found that simply having more officers on the streets, even if they are not arresting or stopping anyone, can be a crime deterrent.”

Jeff Asher is a crime analyst based in New Orleans. He used to work for that city as a crime analyst. He says commonly used crime statistics are imprecise, slow, and prone to manipulation.

Violent Crime Down-Classification

Police departments answer to their bosses, politicians, and a political “obsession” with reducing crime can create pressure on police to manipulate crime figures.

Policing agencies large and small have been caught falsifying data in order to manipulate both the type and number of crimes reported, as well as agency clearance rates. In 2012, an independent study concluded that crime report manipulation (“downgrading crimes to lesser offenses and discouraging victims from filing complaints to make crime statistics look better”) was common among New York City police. Similarly, an analysis by The L.A. Times in 2015 revealed that for eight years leading up to the analysis the LAPD had “misclassified an estimated 14,000 serious assaults as minor offenses in a recent eight-year period, artificially lowering the city’s crime levels.”

Over the past several years, AAPD officers have made a series of allegations that reported crimes are routinely down-classified.

One AAPD officer explains: “Say a call comes in to 911. Dispatch takes the call, writes it up—classifies it—and dispatches officers. They routinely down-classify the crimes reported in the calls. A & B (assault and battery) becomes disorderly conduct. Open calls get closed out then reclassified.”

In response to a question about whether the dispatchers down-classify 911 calls through ineptitude or in an effort to deliberately keep the numbers of violent crimes perpetrated low, the AAPD source said: “Both, I think.”

When asked  about allegations made by AAPD officers about the down-classification of violent crime in his department, then Ann Arbor Police Chief Barnett Jones began the conversation by saying, “I am not a crook.”

Jones “retired” from the AAPD with a $20,000 pension in 2012. The Detroit Free Press revealed in Jan. 2013 that Jones had taken two full-time jobs located 90 miles apart: Chief of Police in Flint, Mich. and Head of Security for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Dept. (overseen by former Ann Arbor city manager Sue McCormick). Jones resigned from the job in Flint, and remains employed by Detroit Water and Sewerage.

While the AAPD’s proper coding of crimes and use of the Michigan Incident Crime Reporting (MICR) system has been audited by state and federal officials, there has been no outside audit of the accuracy of the agency’s crime classifications to determine whether misclassification is going on as alleged. City Council recently approved a $200,000 allocation for an audit of the AAPD’s operations. This several-months-long process will examine the department by a variety of means, including conversations with the AAPD’s staffers. In Fort Meyers, Florida, a similar operational audit resulted in a scathing 72-page report released in Feb. 2017 to the public that documented a department crippled by corruption and suffering from a toxic culture. It’s unclear whether Ann Arbor City Council will release the results of the AAPD audit. Contrary to the state’s FOIA statute, City Attorney Postema has repeatedly denied FOIA requests for reports under the assertion that such documents are exempted. His decisions have not yet been challenged in court.

Chief Baird was asked to comment on the 2015 MICR report data and the fact that the number of violent crimes reported has risen. Deputy Police Chief Pfannes responded and said that AAPD officials were aware of the MICR reports and looking forward to the results of the operational audit.