Mayor Bloomberg says New York City has the lowest murder rate since the Dutch owned the place and it was called New Amsterdam.
Dunno if I believe him.
True, crime rates are down all over the country, but here in New York City we have that special accounting method known as Klein-metic in which only good stats are counted and bad ones are either ignored or suppressed.
Thus New York City has the most edumacated kids in the country even though many can only pass the dumbed-down, in-house graded state tests but not the more rigorous federal tests and graduation rates have been massaged by a credit recovery program that offers failing students a semester credit for reading a Spiderman comic book.
Just as schools are forced to show improved test scores and graduation rates every year or be closed down and replaced by charters, police precincts have to show improved crime stats every year or the city fires the existing brass at the precinct and brings in new brass.
Given the ease with which schools use Klein-metic to massage stats, I just have to wonder if police precinct captains aren't doing the same thing.
You know, like declaring a guy with four bullet holes in his back an "accident victim" ("We think he accidentally shot himself in the back four times...") or just miscounting the number of dead bodies at the end of every week to keep the math nice and neat (i.e., at zero.)
Call me cynical or paranoid, but anything that emanates out of Moneybags' mouth or the commissioners who work for him generally turns out to be self-serving, misleading or an outright lie, and I have trouble with this lowest crime rate since Peter Stuyvesant thing too.
Great minds think alike. I had this on Ed Notes:
ReplyDeleteNYC Murder Rate Down? Where Did Bloomberg Bury the Bodies?
Today's good news was that this year NYC will have the lowest number of murders since record keeping began. Bloomberg is crowing. But those of us in education who know how Bloomberg jukes the stats, cannot help but be skeptical.
But how can he juke the number of murders, you might ask? When you're dead, you're dead.
If you are a fan of The Wire, you will remember how Marlo Stanfield's hit crew somehow managed to do over 20 people and leave no bodies by sealing them up in abandoned housing? Don't bet against Bloomberg's having a couple of hundred missing persons being "housed" on empty city property.
Marlo Stanfield and his crew Chris and Snoop hired as consultants by Bloomberg to "keep" murder rate down.
Yup - or just re-define what an "accident" is. Remember, it's only counted as murder when it's called a murder. But if it's called an accident...
ReplyDeleteAnd remember how Forest Hills got declared one of the top 10 most dangerous schools in the city because they continued to report crimes accurately while so many other schools stopped reporting them at all. (Crimes? what crimes?)