NYPD Refuses To Take Crime Reports To Keep Crime Stats Low (UPDATED)

UPDATE: Proving my point, the NYPD arrested over 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters out of the 500 or so who had gathered in Zuccotti Park to ring in the New Year.

According to the NY Times, the police also tussled with a credentialed news reporter who was trying to document an arrest.

Just more proof that the NYPD is out of control on Occupy protesters even as more and more evidence is coming out that their not doing the job of investigating real crimes.

The City Council needs to drag Ray Kelly's fascist ass before them and have him explain how it is the NYPD is always arresting a slew of Occupy Wall Street protesters but just can't get around to documenting and investigating pickpocket crimes, gropings and intruders...

My wife had her wallet stolen in Herald Square two years ago.

She walked into a crowd at 34th and 6th Avenue with the wallet in her pocket, when she came out of the crowd, it was gone.

The NYPD refused to file a crime report on the pickpocketing.

They claimed since she didn't "feel" anybody steal her wallet, see anybody steal it or notice anybody jostle her, they couldn't classify it as a crime.

Instead it was "lost property."

That night somebody used a credit card from that "lost property" to buy a Happy Meal in an uptown McDonald's.

Now the NYPD had to file the "lost property" as a felony because a credit card was used.

Had my wife only had cash in the wallet and that same Happy Meal been paid for with the stolen cash, the crime never would have been documented in an official report.

At the time I posted that it was clear to me the NYPD was deliberately not filing the stolen wallet as a crime in order to keep crime stats low.

In the end they did document it as a crime only because they had to - using somebody else's credit card is grand larceny.

But you an bet that what happened to my wife two years ago is EXACTLY what happens to thousands of New Yorkers every year when they go to report a crime - the NYPD try and find any way to keep from filing an official crime report for crimes.

Now the NY Times confirms that's EXACTLY what Raymond Kelly's NYPD does:

Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.

...

The reasons for not taking a report, police officials said, can vary. Some officers seek to avoid the dull task of preparing reports; others may fear discipline for errors in paperwork. Sometimes officers run out of time because they are directed to another job.

There are certainly calls that do not merit a crime report: a victim’s account of an alleged crime can be deemed dubious, for example.

However, some commanders said, officers sometimes bend to pressure by supervisors to eschew report-taking. “Cops don’t want a bad reputation, and stigma,” one commander said. “They know they have to please the sergeants.” Like several other officers and supervisors, he spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The sergeants, in turn, are acting on the wishes of higher-ups to keep crime statistics down, a desire that is usually communicated stealthily, the commander said. As an era of low crime continues, and as 2011 draws to a close with felony numbers running virtually even with last year’s figures, any new felony is a significant event in a precinct and a source of consternation to commanders.

...

On the Upper West Side in July, a man in red shorts climbed through a window into the living room where Katherine Davis, 65, was reading the paper. She ran, a few steps ahead of him, and locked herself in an adjacent apartment, where she watched through the peephole as the man searched for her before he left.

Officers drove her around to look for the intruder, unsuccessfully. Ms. Davis asked if they could take fingerprints. But the officers said, “Oh, no, that’s only if you have a detective, or investigation,” she recalled. She asked for a case number.

“They said, ‘There is no case number,’ ” she said.

No one came to interview her or to seek videotape from the numerous surveillance cameras nearby, she said. That is where things ended.

“I just assumed it was laziness,” Ms. Davis said. “Why bother to take a report?”

Even when New Yorkers follow up, they are sometimes surprised to learn that their complaints were never classified as a crime. In one case, Sandra Ung, 37, went to the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown after her wallet disappeared at a Starbucks.

“I had it and then it was gone,” she said of the Feb. 23 episode. She said she believed her wallet had been stolen, but could not prove it. She assumed the police had recorded it as pickpocketing, but when she retrieved a copy of the report days later, she saw it was recorded not as a crime, but as lost property that had gone “missing in an unknown manner.”

That report also reflects the line of questioning Ms. Ung faced; it noted that “she wasn’t bumped nor jostled.”

In June, the Police Department issued a guidebook that instructed officers how to categorize all imaginable variations of crimes — including 24 situations involving identity theft and 3 types of strangulation. Its section on pickpockets could be viewed as a rebuke to how officers handled Ms. Ung’s case and possibly others like it.

The guidelines focused on the very words that the police used to discount her suspicions: “The victim does not need to have witnessed, felt or otherwise been aware of being bumped or jostled in order to properly record the occurrence as grand larceny.”

New York's Era of Low Crime - something Bloomberg and Kelly like to brag about over and over - is the result of deliberate data manipulation by the cops.

I have no doubt that the crime stats in Bloomberg's New York are as manipulated as the graduation rates and tests scores in the schools.

But I have a solution for getting the cops to take a crime report even when they are reluctant to because they want to hold their monthly stats down.

Just tell them the crime was perpetrated by a member of Occupy Wall Street.

They hate Occupy Wall Street and absolutely love arresting anybody associated with the movement and giving them the business in the station house and keeping them in lock-up for 72 hours without access to a lawyer.

If you want Ray Kelly to arrest somebody, just have him hear the words "This guy from Occupy Wall Street did it!"

As I have written before, when the history of the Bloomberg Era is really written (i.e., by somebody not on the Bloomberg, the Zuckerman or the Murdoch payroll), people will find out just how much manipulation and out and out fraud was perpetrated on this city by the man and his minions.