Police Reports Suggest Officers May Sometimes Portray Crimes Less Seriously
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Published: September 16, 2012
On a Friday night two years ago, a 17-year-old fired a pistol at a group of young men on the street near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; two were struck in the leg.
Nearby, Amanda Dominguez, 14, and her older half-sister, Jazmin Rodriguez, were chatting away when the shots rang out. Each suddenly felt a sharp sting.
Jazmin looked down at a hole in her cargo shorts and saw blood. She picked a sliver of metal from her wound, but dropped it, she would later recall. Her sister, Amanda, felt a burn along her shoulder, which a hospital nurse later told her was a graze wound, she said.
But the New York Police Department concluded that both women had merely received scrapes while fleeing the shooting, and did not count them as crime victims.
In recent years, the integrity of the Police Department’s crime statistics has been questioned as accounts emerge by officers who say they are being pressured by their bosses to reduce the number of felony incidents reported.
The issue is particularly sensitive for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who have overseen a significant decline in serious felony crimes throughout their tenure. As that decline has slowed - the yearly crime rate rose slightly in 2011, and is currently running 4.4 percent ahead of last year’s figure - the administration is struggling with the perception that the city is drifting back to a more violent era. Mr. Kelly created a panel in January 2011 to analyze the crime-reporting system, but the panel has not publicly issued a report yet. In addition, the Police Department conducts regular audits of police reports to detect misclassified crimes; in 2011, the error rate was 1.5 percent.
A small number of crimes the police classified as misdemeanors were eventually upgraded by prosecutors to felonies. Many inevitably resulted in plea deals to lesser charges. Nonetheless, 102 people were convicted of felony assault, despite the police’s having classified the crime as a misdemeanor, in 2011, according to data from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services.
It is difficult to determine why the police classify a particular case in one way and not another. Likewise, there is no conclusive evidence that police officers routinely misclassify criminal incidents, or intentionally leave out pertinent information in their paperwork in order to characterize a felony as a misdemeanor. (Misdemeanors are not counted among the seven major crime categories cited in crime statistics commonly used by law enforcement agencies like the Police Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.)
But in a review of more than 100 police reports from the last four months that were provided to The New York Times, there were a number of instances in which the police report seemed to portray a less serious account of a crime than the district attorney, or a victim, provided subsequently.
A police report recorded in South Brooklyn in August lays out what the police characterized as misdemeanor forcible touching, involving a 25-year-old woman and her estranged husband.
The woman had gone to the man’s home to pick up her belongings, but the man pushed her onto a bed and undressed her even as “she stated ‘no’ repeatedly,” according to the report. But after she kicked him, the man “did let her leave,” the police report said, suggesting that the man had backed down.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office saw the event differently, and charged the man with attempted rape, a felony. According to court records, the woman had told prosecutors, in graphic detail, how the man had tried to have sexual intercourse with her. The police report does not include that part of her account, although the woman said in an interview that she made it clear to the police officer that her husband had tried to rape her.
On Aug. 14, the police in the First Precinct in Lower Manhattan recorded two misdemeanor larceny reports after office workers in the same building complained that a group of men had stolen an iPhone and iPad from their desks while pretending to solicit donations for the Boys and Girls Club. Prosecutors called it felony burglary.
Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said that it was rare for police charges to be upgraded, but said that those instances could usually be attributed to when “more information is obtained in an investigation, or conditions change - such as when a victim dies - or in some instances, as a result of being corrected.”
He added that it was “far more common for charges associated with police arrests to be downgraded through plea bargaining, if not abandoned outright through declined prosecutions.”
In other instances, narrative details that the police actually recorded seemed to support more severe charges than those they settle on. An arrest report from August on a domestic violence case in the Bronx notes that a wife had been choked severely enough that she “felt herself beginning to lose consciousness.” The police classified the crime as a misdemeanor, even though it appeared to qualify as a felony because of the severity of the choking.
In June, when a man left a Pep Boys auto parts store in Queens without paying for a tool set, he brandished a razor blade and threatened to cut an employee who confronted him, according to the police report. The police cataloged it as an amalgamation of misdemeanors - menacing, weapon possession and shoplifting - though the crime appeared to fit the definition of felony robbery.
In some instances, critical details appear to have been omitted. In a report taken on June 1 for a misdemeanor assault, a police officer wrote that the victim “states she was struck in the head.” But the same officer, in internal paperwork filed the same day, included an extra detail: the victim said she was struck “in the head with a bottle.”
The involvement of a blunt object like a bottle, left out in the original report, could qualify the crime as a felony.
The police reports reviewed by The Times illustrate the challenge that officers face in trying to quickly sort through various and often competing accounts from accusers, the accused and witnesses. The reports also demonstrate that while an alleged crime is being documented, events that might have instigated the event often go unmentioned.
A misdemeanor police report of an incident in late June gave an account of a woman, Shaprie Jones, 20, throwing a bottle of bleach in her boyfriend’s face. According to court papers filed by prosecutors, the boyfriend has since complained of blurred vision. But Taquana Jones, the mother of the accused bleach thrower, said that the boyfriend had punched his daughter in the face, and that she was defending herself.
“The cops listened to his side of the story and not hers,” Ms. Jones said.
In interviews, numerous police officers and supervisors said that in order to keep reported crimes low, the police do seek out opportunities to “downgrade” crimes, classifying as misdemeanors crimes that could, and often should, be classified as felonies.
Police officers said that it was common for supervisors, who typically show up at the more serious crime scenes after 911 calls reporting felonies, to dictate to police officers how to classify a crime.
One supervisor said it was common for sergeants and lieutenants to pressure officers “to tweak the complaint reports” and sometimes “leave out something” or “change the facts of the situation to make it a non-felony crime.”
“Do I feel that supervisors based on some real or perceived pressure may reclassify crimes? Yes,” said Wilford Pinkney, a former first-grade detective who worked in the Police Department’s management and planning office before retiring in 2009. Mr. Pinkney said he did not believe there existed a “concerted effort” from the top of the department to intentionally misclassify crimes, but he said that among lower-level supervisors there is “a pressure people feel” to not exceed last year’s crime numbers.
Randy Leonard contributed reporting.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/nyregion/misdemeanor-or-felony-new-scrutiny-of-how-police-reports-classify-crime-in-new-york-city.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20120917&_r=0
Published: September 16, 2012
On a Friday night two years ago, a 17-year-old fired a pistol at a group of young men on the street near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; two were struck in the leg.
Nearby, Amanda Dominguez, 14, and her older half-sister, Jazmin Rodriguez, were chatting away when the shots rang out. Each suddenly felt a sharp sting.
Jazmin looked down at a hole in her cargo shorts and saw blood. She picked a sliver of metal from her wound, but dropped it, she would later recall. Her sister, Amanda, felt a burn along her shoulder, which a hospital nurse later told her was a graze wound, she said.
But the New York Police Department concluded that both women had merely received scrapes while fleeing the shooting, and did not count them as crime victims.
In recent years, the integrity of the Police Department’s crime statistics has been questioned as accounts emerge by officers who say they are being pressured by their bosses to reduce the number of felony incidents reported.
The issue is particularly sensitive for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who have overseen a significant decline in serious felony crimes throughout their tenure. As that decline has slowed - the yearly crime rate rose slightly in 2011, and is currently running 4.4 percent ahead of last year’s figure - the administration is struggling with the perception that the city is drifting back to a more violent era. Mr. Kelly created a panel in January 2011 to analyze the crime-reporting system, but the panel has not publicly issued a report yet. In addition, the Police Department conducts regular audits of police reports to detect misclassified crimes; in 2011, the error rate was 1.5 percent.
A small number of crimes the police classified as misdemeanors were eventually upgraded by prosecutors to felonies. Many inevitably resulted in plea deals to lesser charges. Nonetheless, 102 people were convicted of felony assault, despite the police’s having classified the crime as a misdemeanor, in 2011, according to data from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services.
It is difficult to determine why the police classify a particular case in one way and not another. Likewise, there is no conclusive evidence that police officers routinely misclassify criminal incidents, or intentionally leave out pertinent information in their paperwork in order to characterize a felony as a misdemeanor. (Misdemeanors are not counted among the seven major crime categories cited in crime statistics commonly used by law enforcement agencies like the Police Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.)
But in a review of more than 100 police reports from the last four months that were provided to The New York Times, there were a number of instances in which the police report seemed to portray a less serious account of a crime than the district attorney, or a victim, provided subsequently.
A police report recorded in South Brooklyn in August lays out what the police characterized as misdemeanor forcible touching, involving a 25-year-old woman and her estranged husband.
The woman had gone to the man’s home to pick up her belongings, but the man pushed her onto a bed and undressed her even as “she stated ‘no’ repeatedly,” according to the report. But after she kicked him, the man “did let her leave,” the police report said, suggesting that the man had backed down.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office saw the event differently, and charged the man with attempted rape, a felony. According to court records, the woman had told prosecutors, in graphic detail, how the man had tried to have sexual intercourse with her. The police report does not include that part of her account, although the woman said in an interview that she made it clear to the police officer that her husband had tried to rape her.
On Aug. 14, the police in the First Precinct in Lower Manhattan recorded two misdemeanor larceny reports after office workers in the same building complained that a group of men had stolen an iPhone and iPad from their desks while pretending to solicit donations for the Boys and Girls Club. Prosecutors called it felony burglary.
Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said that it was rare for police charges to be upgraded, but said that those instances could usually be attributed to when “more information is obtained in an investigation, or conditions change - such as when a victim dies - or in some instances, as a result of being corrected.”
He added that it was “far more common for charges associated with police arrests to be downgraded through plea bargaining, if not abandoned outright through declined prosecutions.”
In other instances, narrative details that the police actually recorded seemed to support more severe charges than those they settle on. An arrest report from August on a domestic violence case in the Bronx notes that a wife had been choked severely enough that she “felt herself beginning to lose consciousness.” The police classified the crime as a misdemeanor, even though it appeared to qualify as a felony because of the severity of the choking.
In June, when a man left a Pep Boys auto parts store in Queens without paying for a tool set, he brandished a razor blade and threatened to cut an employee who confronted him, according to the police report. The police cataloged it as an amalgamation of misdemeanors - menacing, weapon possession and shoplifting - though the crime appeared to fit the definition of felony robbery.
In some instances, critical details appear to have been omitted. In a report taken on June 1 for a misdemeanor assault, a police officer wrote that the victim “states she was struck in the head.” But the same officer, in internal paperwork filed the same day, included an extra detail: the victim said she was struck “in the head with a bottle.”
The involvement of a blunt object like a bottle, left out in the original report, could qualify the crime as a felony.
The police reports reviewed by The Times illustrate the challenge that officers face in trying to quickly sort through various and often competing accounts from accusers, the accused and witnesses. The reports also demonstrate that while an alleged crime is being documented, events that might have instigated the event often go unmentioned.
A misdemeanor police report of an incident in late June gave an account of a woman, Shaprie Jones, 20, throwing a bottle of bleach in her boyfriend’s face. According to court papers filed by prosecutors, the boyfriend has since complained of blurred vision. But Taquana Jones, the mother of the accused bleach thrower, said that the boyfriend had punched his daughter in the face, and that she was defending herself.
“The cops listened to his side of the story and not hers,” Ms. Jones said.
In interviews, numerous police officers and supervisors said that in order to keep reported crimes low, the police do seek out opportunities to “downgrade” crimes, classifying as misdemeanors crimes that could, and often should, be classified as felonies.
Police officers said that it was common for supervisors, who typically show up at the more serious crime scenes after 911 calls reporting felonies, to dictate to police officers how to classify a crime.
One supervisor said it was common for sergeants and lieutenants to pressure officers “to tweak the complaint reports” and sometimes “leave out something” or “change the facts of the situation to make it a non-felony crime.”
“Do I feel that supervisors based on some real or perceived pressure may reclassify crimes? Yes,” said Wilford Pinkney, a former first-grade detective who worked in the Police Department’s management and planning office before retiring in 2009. Mr. Pinkney said he did not believe there existed a “concerted effort” from the top of the department to intentionally misclassify crimes, but he said that among lower-level supervisors there is “a pressure people feel” to not exceed last year’s crime numbers.
Randy Leonard contributed reporting.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/nyregion/misdemeanor-or-felony-new-scrutiny-of-how-police-reports-classify-crime-in-new-york-city.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20120917&_r=0