As the crime rate in New York continues to decline, the Police Department has credited the use of a sophisticated crime database that pinpoints the frequency and location of murders, burglaries and other crimes. That database, known as CompStat, has also served as evidence of the department’s successes.
New Yorkers, however, have long used a more anecdotal tool of measurement: their own experiences. And those, they say, have been increasingly free of concerns about crime.
So when a new study suggested that police officials were pressured to manipulate CompStat to make it appear as though crime was dropping, New Yorkers allowed that the numbers might be a bit fudged, but said there was no dispute that their neighborhoods felt safer.
Standing among the barrels in the brine-rich air of his Lower East Side pickle shop, Alan Kaufman, 51, said the neighborhood was almost unrecognizable from when he opened his business on the block three decades ago.
“You can always play with statistics,” he said. “But I really think that crime has gone down. What you see is true.”
The accusations that statistics related to the major offenses used to calculate crime rates were being manipulated was raised in a new report by two criminologists who compiled the results of an anonymous survey of hundreds of retired high-ranking police officials, a summary of which was released on Saturday.
A third of the respondents reported that they were aware of inappropriate handling of reported crimes, like persuading victims not to file complaints or finding ways to reclassify a felony as a misdemeanor. The report does not dispute that the crime rate has dropped significantly, but suggests the changes are encouraged by constant pressure for ever-lower crime figures.
The Police Department disputed the findings, saying they were based on flawed methodology and contradicted other reviews of the CompStat program.
Still, at churches, businesses, community meetings and along the sidewalks on a bitingly cold Sunday morning, some said that they had no trouble believing that leaders at some police precincts could be massaging statistics for their own purposes, and a few even offered specific examples of when they felt that the police failed to respond adequately to their crimes.
For the Rev. W. Taharka Robinson, who runs a community group called the Brooklyn Anti-Violence Coalition, the report captured what he believed was a lack of police receptiveness toward crime victims, particularly in minority neighborhoods. “If you go sit in the precinct, you’ll see the nonchalant, lax attitude when people come in wanting to report crimes,” he said. “It discourages people who were victimized because they’re not getting an appropriate response.”
Mujeeb S. Lodhi, owner of Karahi Restaurant and Grill in Jackson Heights, Queens, counts himself among the dissatisfied. Last December, he said, a group of young men, obviously drunk, stormed into his restaurant, pushed him and menaced his employees. When police arrived they let the men go with a verbal warning.
“I said, ‘Officers, you’re supposed to do something,’ ” he recounted with frustration.
Berry Hatfield, a movie production assistant, who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, said that he was disappointed after a crime report that he filed about being menaced with a gun disappeared from the police records. And Chris Henderson, an event planner, shared his experience of being attacked in Brooklyn by a group of teenagers, one of whom struck him with an aluminum pipe.
As the assailants fled, he picked up the pipe, which had been dropped, but the police refused to take it and never followed through with a promise to call him about the attack, he said. “They’ve been twisting these statistics,” Mr. Henderson said.
But many more said they had no reason to distrust the numbers.
The Rev. Luonne Abram Rouse, senior minister at the Metropolitan Community United Methodist Church in Harlem, said he had not heard of any instance where the police sought to downgrade a crime or discourage a victim from filing a report.
“The N.Y.P.D. lays their lives on the line for us every day,” he said. “But they’re human. Mistakes are made. I know that people pad books. They pad books in the banking system. I’ve even known ministers to pad books in the church. It just needs to be investigated.”
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