How Rahm Emanuel Got Chicago's Crime Rate Down

To quote from The Sting, it's simple - he cheats:

It was a balmy afternoon last July when the call came in: Dead body found inside empty warehouse on the West Side.

Chicago police officers drove through an industrial stretch of the hardscrabble Austin neighborhood and pulled up to the 4600 block of West Arthington Street. The warehouse in question was an unremarkable-looking red-brick single-story building with a tall barbed-wire fence. Vacant for six years, it had been visited that day by its owner and a real-estate agent—the person who had called 911.

The place lacked electricity, so crime scene technicians set up generators and portable lights. The power flickered on to reveal a grisly sight. In a small office, on soggy carpeting covered in broken ceiling tiles, lay a naked, lifeless woman. She had long red-streaked black hair and purple glitter nail polish on her left toenails (her right ones were gone), but beyond that it was hard to discern much. Her face and body were bloated and badly decomposed, her hands ash colored. Maggots feasted on her flesh.

At the woman’s feet, detectives found a curled strand of telephone wire. Draped over her right hand was a different kind of wire: thin and brown. The same brown wire was wrapped around each armrest of a wooden chair next to her.

The following day, July 24, a pathologist in the Cook County medical examiner’s office noticed something else that had been obscured by rotting skin: a thin gag tied around the corpse’s mouth.
Thanks to some still-visible tattoos, detectives soon identified this unfortunate woman: Tiara Groves, a 20-year-old from Austin. She was last seen walking alone in the wee hours of Sunday, July 14, near a liquor store two miles from the warehouse. At least eight witnesses who saw her that night told police a similar story: She appeared drunk and was upset—one man said that she was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath—but refused offers of help. A man who talked to her outside the liquor store said that Groves warned him, excitedly and incoherently, that he should stay away from her or else somebody (she didn’t say who) would kill him too.

Toxicology tests showed she had heroin and alcohol in her system, but not enough to kill her. All signs pointed to foul play. According to the young woman’s mother, who had filed a missing-person report, the police had no doubt. “When this detective came to my house, he said, ‘We found your daughter. . . . Your daughter has been murdered,’ ” Alice Groves recalls. “He told me they’re going to get the one that did it.”

On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a homicide by “unspecified means.” This rare ruling means yes, somebody had killed Groves, but the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of death.

Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death investigation. In his writeup, he cited the medical examiner’s “inability to determine a cause of death.”

That lieutenant was Denis Walsh—the same cop who had played a crucial role in the alleged cover-up in the 2004 killing of David Koschman, the 21-year-old who died after being punched by a nephew of former mayor Richard M. Daley. Walsh allegedly took the Koschman file home. For years, police officials said that it was lost. After the Sun-Times reported it missing, the file mysteriously reappeared.

But back to Tiara Groves. With the stroke of a computer key, she was airbrushed out of Chicago’s homicide statistics.

The change stunned officers. Current and former veteran detectives who reviewed the Groves case at Chicago’s request were just as incredulous. Says a retired high-level detective, “How can you be tied to a chair and gagged, with no clothes on, and that’s a [noncriminal] death investigation?” (He, like most of the nearly 40 police sources interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name, citing fears of disciplinary action or other retribution.)

Was it just a coincidence, some wondered, that the reclassification occurred less than two weeks before the end of the year, when the city of Chicago’s final homicide numbers for 2013 would be tallied? “They essentially wiped away one of the murders in the city, which is crazy,” says a police insider. “But that’s the kind of shit that’s going on.”

 

For the case of Tiara Groves is not an isolated one. Chicago conducted a 12-month examination of the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics going back several years, poring through public and internal police records and interviewing crime victims, criminologists, and police sources of various ranks. We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.

This troubling practice goes far beyond murders, documents and interviews reveal. Chicago found dozens of other crimes, including serious felonies such as robberies, burglaries, and assaults, that were misclassified, downgraded to wrist-slap offenses, or made to vanish altogether. (We’ll examine those next month in part 2 of this special report.)

Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the “magic ink”: the power to make a case disappear. Says another: “The rank and file don’t agree with what’s going on. The powers that be are making the changes.”

Read the rest of the Chicago Magazine piece to see how Rahm and his crime lieutenants got their drop in crime stats and think about this the next time you hear Rahm Emanuel or one of his corporate cronies tout his "leadership" in Chicago.

Mayor Bloomberg And Commissioner Kelly May Go On Trial Just Yet

From the Daily News:

AN NYPD supervisor has lost his bid to countersue whistleblower cop Adrian Schoolcraft.

Deputy Inspector Steven Mauriello alleged that Schoolcraft — who has a pending $50 million lawsuit against the city — concocted bogus complaints about wrongdoing in a Brooklyn precinct in order to ruin his boss.

But Manhattan Federal Court Judge Robert Sweet has denied the deputy inspector, finding in part that the counterclaims would be unfair to Schoolcraft, who would have to “expend additional resources . . . preparing for trial.”

Schoolcraft claims the NYPD had him committed to a psych ward against his will because he said cops were using quotas and fudging crime stats.

He is suing the city, Mauriello, Jamaica Hospital and two doctors.

 

A commenter writes:

This guy Schoolcraft has them but good. Tapes that prove the quota system that was setup by Billionaireberg and Kelly. Kelly calls them productivity goals but are plain old quotas just with different wording. Also when Schoolcraft went to the IAB to report what he had on tape and what he was going to do with them the IAB told Mauriello who stormed Schoolcrafts home. In an attempt to find these tapes Schoolcraft was put in a psych ward so his home could be searched and wouldn't be released until Mauriello said it was ok. With Kelly and his boss Billionareberg gone soon I can't wait to see who Mauriello turns in to save his own skin.

Another commenter writes:

My good friend is an NYPD cop and I can tell you EVERYTHING this Schoolcraft guy said is true! He tells me that not only is the workload insane (Kelly has stood by his mantra of "Do More with less" which means that each cop is doing the work of the seven thousand less cops the NYPD now has, compared to years ago), but that the boss' torture them for their arrest and summons quotas. He said that there are severe punishments for cops who don't meet their numbers. I'm really surprised more cops don't snap under the stress. The reporter who broke this story wrote a great book about it. With the stuff that's in there you would think this cop worked in communist Russia or something! The NYPD is out to get it's own. Good cops who stand up to the system are tortured. For the good of the public, something has to change.

So far, Bloomberg and Kelly, along with a compliant corporate press, have kept the wraps on the criminality forced upon the cops from the NYPD brass and City Hall in order to meet their insane quotas.

But the Schoolcraft case may expose all of that and put the Bloomberg and Kelly crime stat miracle to the graveyard where myths go.

I have a friend who works in the system who tells me the crime stats are all phonied up - they arrest people just to make their monthly quotas, they refuse to take some criminal complaints, they downgrade felonies to misdemeanors.

Bloomberg gets feted in the press for making the city the safest it's been since the 1940's.

The truth is, none of the stats can be believed - nothing from the Bloomberg Era can be believed.

Where's Howard Wolfson When You Need Him?

On Monday, Bloomberg shill Howard Wolfson tweeted the following:

No murders in NYC last week. Murders down 26% this year off last year's record low.
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) October 14, 2013

The NY Times today:

After a seven-day stretch in which no homicides were recorded in New York City, five occurred in 10 hours on Friday and Saturday. 

Three killings occurred in the Bronx, and two in Brooklyn. As of Saturday evening, no arrests had been made.

The Bloomberg administration claims New York City is on track to have the lowest number of murders in over fifty years.

But given how they play funny with the emergency response time stats, the crime stats, the graduation rates and the test scores, there are some skeptics out there:

"@howiewolf MT: No NYC murder last week. Murders down 26% this year.” @azi Serious Question: murder being defined/determined same way?
— Rebecca G (@WZora) October 14, 2013

Guarantee you, they're playing funny with the murder stats too. 

"Accidents" and "suicides" abound in this city...

Bloomberg Administration: We Went A Whole Week Without A Murder!

No murders in NYC last week. Murders down 26% this year off last year's record low.
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) October 14, 2013

That tweet got some interesting reactions:

@azi @nycmayorsoffice First time I've seen a mayor's office call attention to 6 days without a reported murder.
— BinghamtonNow (@BinghamtonNow) October 14, 2013

And this:

"@howiewolf MT: No NYC murder last week. Murders down 26% this year.” @azi Serious Question: murder being defined/determined same way?
— Rebecca G (@WZora) October 14, 2013

Only in Bloomberg's New York does someone actually ask the mayor's minion, after he brags that there have been no murders in the city in a week, if they've changed the definition of "murder."

And that's because the data they hawk here in Bloombergville is often hard to be believe.

The test scores, the graduation rates, the crime stats, the emergency response times, etc. - all phonied up.

"Scissors-Wielding Lunatic" Slashes Five People, Including 2 Year Old, On UWS

Gee, doesn't Howard Wolfson live up there?

A scissors-wielding lunatic stabbed and slashed five victims in a Riverside Park rampage before he was subdued Tuesday morning by a brave passerby, police said.

An 18-month-old boy and his father were among those targeted as they strolled through the Manhattan park before the unprovoked 7:58 a.m. attack by a homeless man, police said.

Crazed assailant Julius James Graham, 43, who was living at a Harlem shelter, unleashed his rage without warning on a bright October morning. He was taken down by a passing good Samaritan and held until police arrived.

New York City - safest it's been since the 1940's!

So says Howard Wolfson.

Except for the motorcycle gangs taking over the West Side Highway, the lunatics slashing people in Riverside Park, the crazed men punching people into comas in Union Square and the gay bashing gangs stomping people in Brooklyn.

Other than that, it's safe as hell.

Why The "Historic Low" Crime Statistics Bloomberg Hawks Are Not Believeable

Howie Wolfson likes to tweet the lie that NYC is the safest it's been since the 1950's, with crime at "historic lows."

But tell that to the man who was chased 50 blocks by a motorcycle gang and then beaten on a Washington Heights street in broad daylight in front of his wife and two year old.

You can see the video of that chase and the brutal aftermath below the fold.

Bloomberg's DOE Manipulates Graduation Rates

The Mayor of Money has hailed graduation rate increases as another piece of proof that is education reforms have worked.

But just as the test scores were jive, just as the crime stats are jive, just as the emergency response times are jive - the graduation rates are jive too:

Dozens of struggling city high schools allowed students to use a mishmash of makeup assignments — sometimes requiring little or no work — to earn credits for classes they initially flunked, sources say and data show.

For the first time, the Department of Education has made credit-recovery data publicly available by school — and it shows nearly 40 schools awarded between 5 percent and 31 percent of their credits to kids through makeup work in 2011-12, while close to three dozen gave between 5 percent and 46 percent of their credits that way the previous school year.

Most credit-recovery programs occur over the summer, when students try to learn the course work that eluded them during the year.

But many shortcut programs also cropped up after the department started using credit accumulation as a factor in grading schools in 2007 — putting pressure on them to come up with quick fixes for credit shortages.

“It’s a big issue at the school . . . the reason the principal does this is to make our school look good on our progress report,” said a former teacher at the Academy for Language and Technology in The Bronx, where 13 percent of credits came from makeup work in 2011-12.

The ex-teacher said that students would use an online program called Apex to read passages and answer simple questions — but that no one would prevent them from looking up the answers.

“They just accumulate easy credits rather than learn anything,” the former teacher said.

As I've written before, if there were ever a true independent auditing of the Bloomberg Years, they would find so much manipulation of data and out-and-out fraud from these people that they would be frog-marching Bloomberg administration officials out for months in handcuffs.

The have phonied up everything, put in place policies that forces phonied up data ("Improve or you're fired!" tends to do that sort of thing), but the press has largely ignored the manipulation.

Certainly they have not blamed Bloomberg himself for any of this.

You can bet if de Blasio is elected in November, that will change.

In any case, no wonder Bloomberg is planning on having all the emails and other data from his administration erased before he goes.

That's a great way to ensure his fraudulent legacy never sees the light of day with the public.

Ever Notice How All The Stats Are The "Best Ever" Under Bloomberg?

Howard Wolfson responds to criticism of the police shooting two innocent bystanders in Times Square on Saturday with this:

@mattapuzzo @mikiebarb the NYPD is on pace to have appro 70 police shooting incidents this year, which is the lowest since records were kept
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) September 15, 2013

Highest test scores under Bloomberg - until they were exposed as inflated.

Sky-rocketing graduation rates - except the numbers are inflated by credit recovery programs that give semester credits for tasks like watching movies.

Best crime stats ever - except there is ample evidence the police are manipulating the stats.

Quickest emergency response time ever - except they don't count the time callers spend on the line with 911 operators, thus making the stats look better than they are.

News stories abound of NYPD cops shooting lots of people in the last calendar year - but Wolfson says the approximately 70 police shootings will be "the lowest since records were kept."

So many of the statistics and so much of the data that Bloomberg and his minions hawk to prove Bloomberg is the bestest thing ever are phonied up.

I have a difficult time believing anything Wolfson says in general, but especially when he uses phrases like "the lowest since records were kept."

Too much manipulation and out-and-out fraud perpetrated by this administration (though often ignored by the corporate media) to believe these stats.

Sorry - not every stat in NYC can be the "lowest ever" or the "best ever," the way Bloomberg and his hired henchmen claim.

Bloomberg Wrong On Stop-And-Frisk Race Comments

Last week the Mayor of Money said the NYPD stops too many white people and not enough people of color.

Those comments were controversial, to say the least, but the mayor doubled down on them, saying any City Council member who doesn't vote with him on the stop-and-frisk issue may have to deal with the Bloomberg PAC using its money against them.

Today the NY Daily News looks at the Bloomberg comments on stop-and-frisk and finds them wanting:

The mayor made headlines last week with his assertion that white New Yorkers were stopped too often by officers patrolling the five boroughs, and minority-group members weren’t stopped often enough.

But it’s right there in black and white: The mayoral math on stop-and-frisk doesn’t add up.

A Daily News analysis of NYPD data contradicts Bloomberg’s claim, by looking at all crime suspects versus just violent crime suspects — particularly in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics are in the population minority, but make up the majority of stops.

 ...
 
City Hall released statistics to support Bloomberg’s controversial claim about stop-and-frisk and race.
The NYPD numbers showed 6.9% of the violent crime suspects were white — although whites made up 9.7% of the total number of people stopped.

But The News’ review of NYPD data found police listed a “violent” offense as the suspected crime on little more than one-quarter of the 532,911 stops made last year — mostly for “robbery.” The rest listed “nonviolent” offenses like weapons possession, larceny, pot possession and criminal trespass.

When the lesser offenses are included, whites comprise 13.8% all crime suspects in the city — meaning they were stopped too infrequently.

The 109th Precinct in Queens — where whites and Asians constitute more than 80% of the population — produced the biggest discrepancy: 48% of local crime suspects were black, while 65% of those stopped were black or Hispanic.

The 17-percentage point difference was the largest of any precinct, followed by the 6th Precinct (Greenwich and West Village, 15.6); Midtown North (Hell’s Kitchen, 15), Central Park (14) and the 104th Precinct (Ridgewood, Queens, 13).

Only four of the 22 precincts with a difference of more than 5 percentage points were home to a majority of black or Hispanic residents.

Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna defended the mayor’s numbers, sticking to the “violent” suspect standard.

Selective use of data to push their ill-begotten policies is a hallmark of this administration.

They're doing it with the stop-and-frisk and crime data.

Later today I'll take a look at how they're doing it with the 911 system too.

In the case of the stop-and-frisk policy, funking with the data to sell it is going to come back to haunt them in court:

The future of stop-and-frisk could hinge on Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling on a class-action lawsuit — a decision that could come as early as this week.

Legal experts predict Scheindlin will likely appoint an independent monitor to oversee the nation’s largest police force if she finds the police procedure is unconstitutional.

Scheindlin is widely expected to rule against the NYPD after taking the cops to task for the “high error rate.”

“You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90% of the time,” the judge said. “That’s a lot of misjudgment of suspicion.”

Legal experts predicted she’s likely to order reforms, including a federal monitor who would report to her on problems solely related to stop-and-frisk. She could then compel the NYPD to make changes.

I highlighted part of the judge's statement because it is so emblematic of what is wrong with Bloomberg and Kelly.

 

They pursue an unjust, racist and unconstitutional policy that, at its core, is not about stopping crime but about intimidation and control.

 

Kelly is on record as saying they want every brown and black man in this city worried that they could be stopped at any moment by police and searched, that the city wanted to "instill" fear into them.

 

Kelly and Bloomberg don't care that 90% of the time, stop-and-frisk searches find nothing.

 

The point is to simply stop men of color and intimidate them.

 

At that, the policy is quite successful.

 

I still do not understand, given the racist polices this mayor has pursued, why he does not enjoy the same reputation of being a racist that his predecessor Rudy Giuliani enjoys.

Report Finds NYPD Crime Statistics Are Easily Manipulated

From the NY Times:

A long-awaited report ordered by the police commissioner in New York has found deficiencies in the Police Department’s efforts to detect whether its crime statistics are being manipulated.

 ...

The report was released on Tuesday, more than two years after Mr. Kelly empaneled a committee of former federal prosecutors to review the department’s internal crime-reporting system. 

The committee’s report did not directly address how often such manipulation occurred, but it identified vulnerabilities in the department’s system for auditing the integrity of its crime statistics.

Before each report of a crime is entered into the department’s computer system, relatively few controls exist to prevent officers on the street from refusing to fill out any paperwork or for supervisors to alter paperwork back in the station house, the review found. 

While praising the department on the considerable resources devoted to auditing crime statistics, the committee noted that most of those efforts were directed at identifying “human error” — that is, unintentional mistakes in a police officer’s paperwork. But for “an officer who wishes to manipulate crime reporting,” the report said there were “few other procedures in place that control the various avenues of potential manipulation.” 

...

The 60-page report describes several instances of manipulation in which felony crimes were marked down as misdemeanors. In one instance “a desk officer scratched out the item values in order to bring the total to below the $1,000 threshold for grand larceny,” which is a felony. 

In another instance, police paperwork for lost property “described a complainant who ‘lost property’ following an assault by multiple individuals,” according to the report, which added, “On its face the narrative appears to describe a robbery.” 

In the aggregate, the report found, the effect of such errors, intentional or otherwise, on crime statistics was not negligible. “A close review of the N.Y.P.D.’s statistics and analysis demonstrate that the misclassifications of reports may have an appreciable effect on certain reported crime rates,” the report said. 

The report noted, for instance, that Police Department auditors had already detected an error rate in 2009 suggesting that grand larcenies were undercounted that year by 2,312. The adjusted figures represent a 4.6 percent increase over the figures that the department issued that year. 

I've said this before, I'll say it again:

The NYPD crime statistics under Kelly are as phony as the test scores under Klein.

If there were an independent audit of the NYPD free from Kelly's or Bloomberg's manipulation and influence, they would find every crime category would go up - including homicides.

Firefighters Union: Bloomberg Funks With Emergency Response Time Data

From the Daily News:

The city is playing with fire as 911 call centers go dangerously understaffed and the FDNY underreports its emergency response times, union officials claimed Wednesday.

The FDNY is fudging its emergency response times by as much as a minute by not including how long it takes a caller to get through the understaffed 911 system, said firefighter union head Steve Cassidy.

“They’re not counting the time a 911 caller spends with the 911 operator. The time is significant — over a minute,” said Cassidy, citing FDNY response time data from the last two weeks analyzed by his union.

“When the (FDNY) says response times are four minutes for structural fires, the reality is they’re five minutes, if not longer. When they talk about medical emergencies that are 5 1/2 minutes, the reality is they’re closer to seven,” Cassidy said. 

He blasted the department for not releasing info to the public that tracks emergency response calls from the moment a 911 call is answered by an operator. Historically, the stats are based on when a fire truck or ambulance is dispatched on a call.

Bloomberg claims the city has the fastest response times in history:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fewer people died in fires in New York City in 2012 than in any year since modern record keeping began nearly a century ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Wednesday.

 

There were 58 fire-related deaths last year, compared to 66 in 2011, according to the city's data, which extends back to 1916.

Bloomberg said the shrinking figures marked a continual decline in fire-related deaths in recent decades. There was an average of 140 fire-related deaths a year in the 1990s, and 278 in the 1970s, according to the city.

"With (a) record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city's history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety," Bloomberg said in a statement.

Last week, he announced that there were fewer homicides in the city -- 414 in 2012 -- than at any point since modern crime records began in 1963.

The fire department's ambulance service also broke a new record for response times, Bloomberg said. The average response time to life-threatening medical emergencies was 6:30 minutes in 2012, shaving off a second from the previous record set in 2011, he said.

Of course if you add the the time a 911 caller spends with the 911 operator, then the response times are not historic in the least.

Is Bloomberg unaware of the funkiness in the city' reporting of the data?

Is he aware of it but doesn't care?

It's one or the other and either way, it's a big problem.

Looks like we need a Truth Commission for the FDNY data, along with the NYPD crime data and the NYCDOE test scores and graduation rates.

Michael Bloomberg Belongs In Jail Next To Beverly Hall

Via Diane Ravitch, here is Sol Stern at The Daily Beast comparing Georgia governor Sonny Perdue's response to the Atlanta cheating allegations compared to Michael Bloomberg's here in NYC:

As I read about the indictments, I could not help but compare what Governor Perdue did in Atlanta with the way Mayor Michael Bloomberg handled allegations of test fraud during his 12 years at the helm of New York City’s schools. Like Beverly Hall and other Atlanta officials, Bloomberg proclaimed miraculous gains in student achievement as a result of the reforms he instituted after the state legislature gave him control of the city’s school system in 2002. In the midst of his 2005 reelection campaign Bloomberg invited the city press corps to PS 33, an elementary school in one of the Bronx’s poorest neighborhoods to hear about one of those academic miracles. The school and its principal, Elba Lopez, had just hit the jackpot on the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Over 83 percent of the 140 fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), Mayor Bloomberg announced, compared with only 35.8 percent proficiency in 2004. Like Atherton Elementary in Atlanta, this was a “statistically improbable” one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The scores for these predominantly minority and poor students were just four percentage points below the average for the richest suburban districts in the state. According to the mayor, the test results proved that his education reforms “really are paying off for those who were previously left behind.” Not a single reporter at the press conference questioned the mayor’s claim of historic, unprecedented educational gains.

Shortly after the test scores were announced, Elba Lopez retired, collecting a $15,000 bonus for her school’s spectacular performance, thus boosting her pension by as much as $10,000 per year. In 2006 the same cohort of students, now fifth-graders, fell back to a pass rate of only 47 percent, and the pass rate for the new crop of fourth-graders was just 41 percent. After I reported this startling turnabout in City Journal and reporter Andrew Wolf did the same in the New York Sun, it became fairly obvious that someone had tampered with the students’ 2005 exams. With Mayor Bloomberg successfully reelected, even his own Department of Education (DOE) felt some pressure and said it would take a second look. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein asked his Counsel, Michael Best, to refer the matter to the city’s Department of Investigations (DOI). But Best left the referral on his desk for six months. (“I goofed,” he said, when I asked why he delayed the referral.) But the DOI, whose head Richard Condon is appointed by the Mayor, declined to take the case. It was then left to the DOE’s small and understaffed investigative unit to follow up. The department had waited almost two years to start an investigation, and by this time the suspicious test papers had been destroyed.

In a report issued almost four years after the tests were administered the department’s lone investigator found no wrongdoing, yet neglected to interview PS 33’s principal Elba Lopez. As the New York Post explained in its singularly pithy way, City clears self. When I asked DOE counsel Best how the most likely suspect could be cleared without even an interview, he responded that the department’s investigator “couldn’t find her.” A few months later, New York Post reporter Yoav Gonen located Lopez at her apartment in the Bronx, exactly where she had always lived. Lopez assured the Post that there was no cheating; the reason that the students didn’t maintain their spectacularly high scores for more than one test cycle, she explained, was that the school had a new, inexperienced principal.

I have written over and over that if Mayor Bloomberg's tenure here as mayor was given a going over with a fine-toothed comb by an independent auditor not beholden to the mayor and not needing future employment and/or largesse from either the mayor or his corporate buddies, the crime statistics, the fire fatality statistics and the emergency response time statistics, the test scores and the graduation rates would all be found to be fraudulent.

Here's an example outside of education and crime of how Bloomberg funks with the numbers here in the city.

Currently Bloomberg claims New York City has the lowest fire fatality rate in history - and the mayor says this is because they have the fastest response time they have ever had:

"With record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city's history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety," Bloomberg said. "The FDNY has consistently improved fire safety over the past decade and has continued to drive response times to historic lows. These achievements and the efforts by our firefighters, EMT's and paramedics to save lives - while putting theirs on the line - is the reason fewer New Yorkers died as a result of fire in 2012 than ever before."

But a notorious report done at the behest of the city by Winbourne Consulting on the city's troubled 911 system found the following:

The group also accused the city of using inaccurate response times, since the city fails to include the amount of time it takes for a 911 operator to answer a call and loop in the relevant dispatcher — as other cities do.

“This practice inhibits the ability of the NYPD and FDNY Fire and EMS to generate accurate Response Time Information,” the report writes.

In other words, the historically low response time that the mayor is claiming to have is based on a phonied up practice that allows the FDNY to ignore the time 911 operators take with callers.

 

If the mayor's claims about the lowest fire fatality rates in NYC history are based on phonied up response time rates by the FDNY, it raises questions about the mayor's historical claims on fire fatalities.  

 

Are they based on phonied up data too?

Given the data manipulation and stat juking the Bloomberg administration has done with the education and NYPD statistics, I think the fire fatality statistics merit a second look, although I doubt anybody is going to question the mayor's claims of fire fatalities registering at historic lows.

As Sol Stern noted in his Daily Beast piece, reporters rarely challenge Bloomberg's claims of historic gains, whether they be in education statistics, crime statistics or anything else

In addition to the data manipulation and stat juking, if Bloomberg's consultant contracts and technology contracts and dealings were ever given the same once over by an independent auditor, New Yorkers would discover that the Bloomberg administration has allowed more money to be stolen during the mayor's tenure than at any time in this city since Boss Tweed ran New York from his clubhouse.

But Mayor Bloomberg, the second richest American, is not going to receive that once over - not by a press that he owns, not by politicians who fear his PAC and his wrath.

Quite frankly, if Beverly Hall is put in prison for tampering with student test papers, along with other charges such as “racketeering, theft, making false statements and false swearing," if she is facing jail time for creating "an environment where achieving the desired end result was more important than the students’ education," than Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein belong in cells next to her.

And as long as we're talking criminal liability for stat juking and data manipulation, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly certainly should be investigated as well.

I am under no illusion that that will happen, of course.

The black woman formerly running the Atlanta school district, along with the largely black educators who were indicted with her, will face justice in their scandal.

But the rich white man who owns NYC, along with his white male toadies like Klein and Kelly, will almost certainly not.

NYPD Manipulates Crime Stats

So says a new study conducted by John Eterno and Eli Silverman:

An anonymous survey of nearly 2,000 retired officers found that the manipulation of crime reports — downgrading crimes to lesser offenses and discouraging victims from filing complaints to make crime statistics look better — has long been part of the culture of the New York Police Department.

The results showed that pressure on officers to artificially reduce crime rates, while simultaneously increasing summonses and the number of people stopped and often frisked on the street, has intensified in the last decade, the two criminologists who conducted the research said in interviews this week.

“I think our survey clearly debunks the Police Department’s rotten-apple theory,” said Eli B. Silverman, one of the criminologists, referring to arguments that very few officers manipulated crime statistics. “This really demonstrates a rotten barrel.”

Dr. Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and John A. Eterno, a retired New York police captain, provided The New York Times with a nine-page summary of the survey’s preliminary results.

...

Dr. Eterno and Dr. Silverman have previously argued that the Police Department’s longstanding focus on reducing major felony crimes has given rise to “a numbers game.”

Their survey is likely to rekindle the debate, which flared up earlier this year after The Village Voice detailed the case of Adrian Schoolcraft, an officer in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn who secretly gathered evidence, including audio recordings, of crime-report manipulation. Shortly after Mr. Schoolcraft presented the evidence to police investigators, his superiors had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, saying he was in the midst of a psychiatric emergency.

The survey, conducted earlier this year, was financed by Molloy College. Dr. Eterno and Dr. Silverman e-mailed a questionnaire to 4,069 former officers who had retired since 1941. Roughly 48 percent — 1,962 retired officers of all ranks — responded.

The respondents ranged from chiefs and inspectors to sergeants and detectives. About 44 percent, or 871, had retired since 2002. More than half of those recent retirees said they had “personal knowledge” of crime-report manipulation, according to the summary, and within that group, more than 80 percent said they knew of three or more instances in which officers or their superiors rewrote a crime report to downgrade the offense or intentionally failed to take a complaint alleging a crime.

One officer, who retired in 2005, wrote that he heard a deputy commissioner say in a “pre-CompStat meeting” that a commanding officer “should just consolidate burglaries that occurred in an apartment building and count as one.”

“Also not to count leap-year stats.”

Another respondent, who retired in 2008, wrote, “Assault becomes harassment, robbery becomes grand larceny, grand larceny becomes petit larceny, burglary becomes criminal trespass.”

Dr. Eterno, now director of the graduate criminal justice program at Molloy College, said he was startled by the responses.

“What we’ve been able to document here is how many times they’ve seen these manipulations,” he said. “It’s three or more times. That translates, conservatively, into at least 100,000 manipulations, if you extrapolate out the responses to the 35,000 officers on the force.”

As I shared with you before, I have personal experience with NYPD cops trying to discourage my wife and I from reporting a crime.

She had her wallet picked on 34th and 6th. When we walked into a crowd outside Victoria's Secret, she had her wallet. When we walked out of that crowd and got to the PATH station one block away, her wallet was gone.

The responding cops refused to file a crime report. They said since we had not actually seen anybody steal the wallet out of her purse and she had not felt anybody put their hands into her purse, it would be classified as "lost."

Later that night, someone tried to use a credit card from that "lost" wallet to buy a Happy Meal at a McDonald's in Washington Heights .

Trying to use someone else's credit card is a felony, so now the cops had to file a crime report. But each precinct fought for the report to be filed somewhere else. Should the midtown Manhattan precinct file it, where the wallet was lifted? Or should the Washington Heights precinct file the report, where the credit card was used?

The cops from both precincts made the issue as difficult and as big a pain in the ass as possible - like they were pissed they had to file a report.

I've heard from other people, including some who work for the NYPD, that fraudulent reporting is a daily occurrence in Bloomberg's New York, but two summer's ago, I got an upfront seat to it.

With this new study, we have more proof that Bloomberg's policing "miracle" is as fraudulent as his education miracle.

Blog Releases Data On Crimes Committed By Murdoch Reporters

The Murdoch papers are always pushing accountability for teachers - how about some accountability for the crimes committed by Murdoch reporters?

Today some of the criminal hackers working in the British wing of Murdoch's company got a little light shone onto their activities:

The names of three dozen British journalists allegedly involved with a shady private investigator were leaked Tuesday to the Internet, posing another potential embarrassment for the U.K.'s scandal-tarred media.

Paul Staines, who blogs under the name Guido Fawkes, published what he said were more than 1,000 recorded transactions between staffers at Rupert Murdoch's British papers and freelance detective Steve Whittamore, who was convicted of trading in illegally obtained information.

In a blog post, Staines said he wanted to expose the "industrial scale criminality" perpetrated by Britain's press, accusing newspaper companies of refusing to name names because they "do not wish to report their own crimes."

Whittamore worked with hundreds of reporters, bending or breaking the law to keep his clients supplied with unlisted numbers, vehicle registration records and other confidential information. Whittamore was convicted in 2005, but did not go to prison and none of the journalists who were named in his files were ever punished.

Interest in Whittamore and his associates has been revived by Britain's phone hacking scandal, which erupted last year after it emerged that Murdoch's News of the World tabloid routinely hacked into the phones of celebrities and others in the news and bribed officials to win scoops.

The hacking scandal has rocked Britain's establishment, leading to a slew of arrests, lawsuits, settlements and high-profile resignations. Murdoch has since closed the News of the World and a judge-led inquiry could yet propose sweeping changes to the way Britain's press is regulated.

Several British media organizations -- including the Guardian, The Independent and ITV News -- have run stories based on the documents recovered from Whittamore's office, but so far none have identified the journalists involved.

Staines did so Tuesday, publishing a spreadsheet naming 35 journalists from Murdoch's News International, the British newspaper division of his global News Corp. media empire.

The Guido Fawkes blog, whose name is a reference to the 17th-century Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament, only published a small subset of the more than 300 reporters named in Whittamore's files, but it includes several people at the heart of the hacking scandal.

Among them: former Murdoch protege Rebekah Brooks (under her maiden name); former News of the World Chief Reporter Neville Thurlbeck (whose name is misspelt in the file); and the scandal's first whistleblower, Sean Hoare, who has since died.

...

Being in Whittamore's files isn't necessarily evidence of wrongdoing -- some of his searches could have been carried out by checking voter rolls or county court records.

However many tasks -- such as police records or vehicle registration searches -- could have been against the law. And if journalists knew how Whittamore was getting his information, they could have been prosecuted alongside him.

The Guido Fawkes post is here.

The Operation Motorman Blue Book of Murdoch reporters is here.

Murdoch's papers are always hawking "accountability" for teachers and schools and government employees and the like.

When it comes to accountability for the behavior of their own employees as well as for the culture of criminality put into place by Rupert Murdoch, they're not so much in favor of that.

But in the interest of both fairness and accountability, it is excellent that the Guido Fawkes blog published this information.

The criminal hackers at the NY Post wrote an editorial today decrying a move by New York politicians to limit access to teacher evaluations by the media, asking in effect, "Why don't teachers want their evaluations public? What do they have to hide?"

The same could certainly said for the Murdoch-owned News Corporation itself which has been embroiled in so many scandals and revelations of criminal activity this past year - from hacking to bribery to TV piracy - that it's hard to keep track.

Today we got a spreadsheet from Guido Fawkes that helps with that task.

Bloomberg, Kelly, and the Vaunted New York City Crime Stat Miracle

Dear Leader Bloomberg and his police commissioner Raymond Kelly like to point to statistics showing New York is the safest it's been decades.

Violent crime, they say, is especially down.

And yet, we have stories like this one from this morning's Daily News:

Criminals feasted on violence over Thanksgiving.

In a 24-hour span there were eight shootings, five stabbings and at least four slashings — with two of those incidents becoming homicides.

Among the dead was Eric Norman, 18, who was found with a gunshot to the head in the driveway of a home on Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway about 10 p.m. on Thursday.

Police said there were seven other shootings across the city between 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving and 6 a.m. on Black Friday.

Eleven people were hit with bullets altogether, but Norman, who has prior collars for drug offenses, was the only fatality. Police did not reveal a motive in his killing, and an arrest had not been made as of Friday night.

The five stabbing incidents left six people with knife wounds, one of whom died of the injuries, police said.

The dead man, a 26-year-old whom police did not identify, was killed in the second installment of violence between groups in Jamaica, Queens, shortly before midnight Friday.

The unidentified man was walking with a pal near 143rd St. and 90th Ave. when they were confronted by three men, police sources said. An argument led to a fight, but it was broken up when a good Samaritan came out of his home.

The three attackers left, but returned a short time later to settle the score. The 26-year-old man was stabbed several times in the torso; he died at Jamaica Hospital. His friend was knifed once in the torso and was in stable condition at the same hospital, police said.

The attackers also got even with the good Samaritan, clubbing him with a baseball bat, one of the sources said. No arrests were made.

In Staten Island, two men and a woman were wounded when a gunman opened fire outside the Da’ Game night club on Van Duzer St. in Stapleton about 2 a.m. Friday.

Six people were bloodied in the four slashings, including two women and a man who were attacked as a nut went wild near Club La Vie in the East Village about 4 a.m. Friday.

A 27-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman had left the club and were standing down the block, on the corner of First St. and First Ave., when a man slashed her face and her companion’s face and chest, a police source said.

A 23-year-old woman who was walking on the street was also slashed in an arm. All survived.

Police said it’s not clear what prompted the vicious assaults, but that a suspect was being questioned last night.

Last April, New York State released a report showing how the city's crime rate ranked in the overall state:

Crime in New York State is on the decline, but embedded in the overall narrative is a shift in the regions where it is taking place.

Specifically, crime within New York City accounted for 63 percent of all the crime within the state in 1990, with the remainder occurring everywhere else in the state outside the boundaries of New York’s five boroughs.

But those numbers are now reversed.

In 2010, reports of crime in the counties outside New York City accounted for 58 percent of all the state’s crime — in the seven major categories of crime, known as index crimes. And the rest of it, or 42 percent, took place within New York City.

That was one takeaway fact from a report issued this week by the State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ office of research and performance.

“That’s a trend that has been going for a while, but it is certainly noted here,” said John M. Caher, a spokesman for the agency. “Much of the decrease in crime has been driven by New York City.”

...

To Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, it is noteworthy that “the flip” in the city’s proportion of statewide crime occurred at a time when the city’s population was increasing.

The state agency’s report is chock full of other facts.

In another New York City-centric offering, it said that while violent crime in the city fell by nearly 30 percent since 2001, “the non-New York City counties reported a decrease of almost 9 percent.”

Each category of violent crime has declined in the city and in the rest of the state since 2001, except for murders, which rose slightly outside the city.

Now I have noted before on this blog how some people in the criminal justice field think the Bloomberg/Kelly crime stats are jive.

In fact, back in 2010, two criminologists published a study showing how the city's crime statistics are just that:

Days after a Brooklyn cop and a Queens politician accused the police of cooking its crime statistics, a survey of more than one hundred retired NYPD higher-ups showed that cops—who are under constant pressure to produce happy-looking stats—have routinely fabricated or manipulated their data, since the crime analysis system was put into place in 1995. And the statistics they produce are the very same that Bloomberg quotes when he says the city is safe, and getting safer every year. “Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics,” said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a former NYPD captain.

“As one person said, the system provides an incentive for pushing the envelope,” another researcher, Eli B. Silverman told the NY Times. Together with Eterno he's writing a book tentatively titled “Unveiling Compstat: The Naked Truth.” Researchers think that for one, there was a periodic practice, of underreporting the value of goods stolen, so that there would be fewer grand larcenies (thefts of over $1000) on the record. Other times, they believe that precinct commanders and aides went to crime scenes to convince victims not to file complaints, or to encourage them to file less serious complaints.

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said the study was flawed because of its anonymity, and because multiple respondents could be remembering the same incidents. He added that there have been two other, better studies analyzing crime stats. One, administered by NYU concluded that, “the city and department officials, and the public can be reasonably assured that the N.Y.P.D. data are accurate, complete and reliable.”

Still, those surveyed were frank in their criticism of the system. “CompStat was a good idea in theory,” wrote one respondent. “However the process rules managerial decisions. We do not manage to serve people but to lower crime statistics any way we can because your career depends on it.”

Now I'm not a cop and don't claim to be one. I'm not a criminologist and don't claim to be one of those either.

But as a teacher, I have seen the system that Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein out into place that rewarded schools that manipulated crime stats, graduation rates, test scores etc. and punished schools that didn't.

You don't have to be a genius to make the leap from "manipulated education stats" to "manipulated crime stats" when cops are claiming they work under the same kind of system that rewards those who "lower crime statistics any way we can" rather than, you know, actually lowering crime.

Two anecdotal stories to add to this.

My wife had her wallet stolen a year back in Herald Square. It was quite clear it was stolen there. When we walked into a crowd outside Victoria's Secret on 34th and 6th Avenue, she had it on her. When we walked out of that crowd and attempted to use the PATH train on 32nd and 6th, it was gone. The police refused to declare this incident a crime, insisting that she didn't know whether it was stolen or lost. It wasn't until somebody used her credit card later to buy a Happy Meal at a McDonald's in Washington Heights that the cops were forced to declare the incident a crime (unlawful use of a credit card is a felony.)

A co-worker of mine told me a story that happened to his friend in Midtown. He was in a deli when he saw two guys in the store begin to beat up somebody else in the store. Not knowing what was happening, he began yelling "Hey, what are you doing?" when somebody cold-cocked him from the side and knocked him out. When he awoke, he found himself laying in the street, face bruised and bloodied. He attempted to get the police to investigate, but first one precinct told him he was in the wrong jurisdiction, then when he finally got to the right precinct, the police refused to make a report. One cop said that it looked more like a lover's spat than a crime and he ought to take it easy when arguing with his boyfriend. My co-worker said that his friend said he left the precinct in disgust, unable to file a report, frustrated by the red tape that sent him to two different precincts, and angered over the treatment he got from the police.

Now again, these stories are anecdotal and the NYPD claims the 2010 report is flawed and Bloomberg points to all the tourists that feel safe enough to come to the city every year as proof positive that New York City is safe and crime is down.

But every time I see a story like the one from the Daily News about the violence that took place in the city over a 24 hour period, violence that even the NYPD could not mischaracterize or refuse to file reports on, I really do wonder just how phony the Bloomberg/Kelly crime miracle is.

Is it as phony as the Bloomberg/Klein education miracle?

Bloodshed Across City

A bloody night in New York:

Bullets flew across New York City late Saturday and early Sunday, as vicious gunfire left two men dead and 15 people injured in Brooklyn, Queens and Harlem.

Seven separate shootings bloodied Brooklyn alone, including fatal fights in Brownsville and East New York, where a 22-year-old Queens father died.

Anthony McRae, 22, was gunned down about 4:45 a.m. Sunday in front of the Hamzah Deli and Grocery on Rockaway Ave., police said.

He was shot at least four times and cops are reviewing deli surveillance tapes, but do not have any suspects in custody yet.

McRea lived in Far Rockaway and worked two jobs at AT&T and Foot Locker to support his 2-year-old son, Carter, family said.

...

Around midnight, three young teens were also shot in Marine Park, Brooklyn during a spat over a 16-year-old's bike. Three people were injured, one critically.

Less than half an hour later, a shooting at a Prospect-Lefferts Gardens house party left five people wounded. Two men who were denied entrance to the gathering, unloaded about 12:15 a.m. into the crowd of revelers gathered outside 349 Fenimore Street, an eye witness said.

In Brownsville, a 45-year-old man was shot multiple times and died near his home late Saturday night.

Jerry Armstrong, 45, was found with several gun shot wounds on 95th Street about 11 p.m. Saturday.

Two additional shootings left two men wounded in Brooklyn, as did a pair of shootings in Queens. One person was also wounded in Harlem.

Of course none of this happened in the parts of the city where Bloomberg and his cronies live, so it'll be like it never happened.

And of course the city's crime stats are about as reliable as the NYCDOE test score stats and graduation rate data, so when Bloomberg says this city's safer than ever, he's full of shit.

Make no mistake, the city is growing more dangerous by the month.

Bloomberg Criticized For Saying City Streets Safe For Women

The Mayor of Money is revealed as an out-of-touch elitist once again:

Mayor Bloomberg crowed Monday that city streets have never been safer - day or night - for women, but some skeptical New York ladies suggested he take a walk in their neighborhoods.

At a tour of a Queens school Monday night, the mayor proudly declared: "People don't remember 10 years ago. They've really already forgotten when you couldn't walk the streets."

"Today, a woman could walk in virtually every neighborhood in this city during the day and not look over her shoulder, and most neighborhoods at night," he added.

But Bronx resident Carla Banks, 31, said living on the upper East Side has left the mayor clueless about what women face.

"Bloomberg's trippin'," said Banks, of Kingsbridge Heights. "This isn't the upper East Side. He's definitely out of touch with what women deal with in the Bronx."

Her pal Devon Irving, 29, said he should take a solo stroll down her block. "I know the mayor doesn't have to worry about walking home from the subway, but I sure do," said Irving, of Mount Eden. "If he thinks we don't still have to watch our backs, he's crazy."

Nora Nestor, 32, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said she wouldn't change where she lives, but she never lets her guard down.

"I love my neighborhood. I feel safe in it, but I wouldn't walk anywhere in New York without being aware of what's behind my shoulder," she said. "As a woman, you have to be aware of your surroundings."

Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Elizabeth Truemper, 25, said some parts of Brooklyn are more dangerous for women than men.

"There's no way I'd walk from Bed-Stuy to Bushwick, but I have male friends that walk from Bushwick to Bed-Stuy," she said.

The mayor boasted about female safety after Rabbi Yaakov Bender, the dean of Yeshiva Darchei Torah School in Far Rockaway, thanked him and NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly for keeping the streets safe.

But at a community meeting the mayor later attended in Far Rockaway, Beverly Champion didn't second the sentiment.

She complained to the mayor about crime in housing developments, saying, "I've lived here all my life, and I've never seen it as worse." Champion said she doesn't feel safe walking around with her purse and laughed when told what the mayor had said earlier about crime.

"He's not telling the truth," she said. "He just takes the reports that they give him, but he doesn't know."

Even women with tony Manhattan zip codes called the mayor out on his comments.

"He's a bit off the mark," said Carson Demmons, 26, of NoHo. "I've lived in neighborhoods where I wouldn't give it a second thought during the day, but it was a whole different story at night. You still need to keep your wits about you."

Bloomberg's boasts did get some support - from women who live in his neighborhood.

"Yes, it has gotten better," said upper East Sider Theresa Ackerly, 43. "This nabe changed a lot. Back in the '80s, there were a lot of gangs. Mayor Bloomberg is doing all right in terms of crime."

Come on, ladies - if the snow is cleared on the UES, the city is cleared.

And if the UES feels safer to the mayor and that other woman the reporter talked to, then the city is safer.

The Bronx? Far Rockaway?

Where the f@#k are those places?

The mayor doesn't know, and he doesn't really care.

Times Sues NYPD For Withholding Information

The Mayor of Accountability loves data and says that the DOE MUST release the Teacher Data Reports with all the errors in them to the press because there is NOTHING more important than data and parents MUST have this.

But strangely enough, he's not so keen on releasing NYPD data:

The New York Times has sued the New York Police Department, saying the department had routinely violated a state law that requires government agencies to provide information to the press and the public.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, The Times described four requests made by reporters this year for information that it said the police had delayed or denied. The Times said the department’s handling of the requests reflected a pattern and practice by which the police avoided providing material that the State Freedom of Information Law said must be released.

“We’ve become increasingly concerned over the last two years about a growing lack of transparency at the N.Y.P.D.,” said David E. McCraw, a vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company. “Information that was once released is now withheld. Disclosures that could be made quickly are put on hold for months.”

...

In the lawsuit, The Times asked for a judicial order requiring the police to turn over the information and barring the Police Department “from continuing its pattern and practice of violating FOIL,” the acronym for the Freedom of Information Law.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that based on a preliminary review of The Times’s lawsuit, “none of the FOIL requests about which The Times complains, is, in our view, ripe for litigation.”

“These requests are being processed by the N.Y.P.D. in accordance with controlling law,” Mr. Browne said by e-mail. “We disagree with The Times’s interpretation of FOIL as contained in the papers we received.”

...

The four requests from Times reporters were for the addresses of New York City residents who had been granted gun permits, for the Police Department’s database on hate crimes, for its database on crime incident reports and for the tracking log on Freedom of Information requests.

The lawsuit said the police had “no legal basis for withholding the materials sought” by the reporters.

It said the police had released the hate crimes database to The Times once before, in 2005.

The lawsuit also said the police had regularly failed to respond to requests as fast as the law required and had failed to consider appeals quickly when the department denied a request.

In recent years, the department has maintained a tight grip on what the public knows and does not know about its inner workings. Its strict control of information has ranged from data on crime trends to nuggets of information sought by journalists, scholars, lawmakers and others.

So a tight grip on NYPD data, including crime stats, but they want to publish the TDR's with all the errors as soon as possible.

Just another example of the hypocritical Mayor of Accountability in action.