Thursday, April 30, 2015

Bloomberg's NYCDOE Covered Up Violence In Schools

This isn't a surprise:

A review of violent episodes at 10 public schools in New York City found that the Education Department failed to report nearly a third of the cases to the state, as required, according to an audit the state comptroller released on Wednesday.

The audit, which examined episodes during the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years, also found that some were inappropriately classified as less serious than they were.

“When incidents don’t get reported or are in effect downgraded, schoolchildren are put potentially in harm’s way,” the comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said, adding, “The Department of Education can’t risk leaving parents uninformed about what’s going on in their child’s school.”

The more than 400 episodes that went unreported at the 10 schools included 50 assaults resulting in injuries, among them one case at Intermediate School 27 on Staten Island in which a student pushed another student over a desk, knocking him to the floor with the desk landing on top of him; 13 sex offenses; and two instances of confiscated weapons.

The state uses the city’s annual reports of violent episodes to designate certain schools as “persistently dangerous.” Those schools are required to take steps to reduce violence and to notify parents that they are entitled to enroll their children at a less violent place.

Again, no surprise that the Data King's Department of Education underreported violence in public schools because his police department underreported crimes.

Take this NY Times article from July 2013, for example:


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. 

Bloomberg's data fetish - the data must always be better!!! - brought about all kinds of manipulation, deception, and outright falsification to how the city government agencies and departments operated.

If there were any independent study of the Bloomberg Years done, it would expose this for all to say.

Alas, there has not and probably will not be and so instead we are left with the myth of the "uber-competent" Mayor Bloomberg.

7 comments:

  1. Bloomberg is Mussolini 2.0

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  2. Bloomberg has ruined the lives of many hard working nyc people. Bloomberg quite frankly might be the biggest fake artist of our modern time. This midget is a complete manipulator and will go to extremes to make himself look like the messier. People who know him claim he is the biggest ass hole you ever want or do not want to meet. The NYCDOE had to endure him for 12 years and the damage he did to the students and teachers is not something we can put into data - he has destroyed the infrastructure of our school system and h as destroyed teacher morale throughout the city while this ass hole goes back to work on wall street looking to make more money for himself.

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    1. All billionaires are fake artists. They have an insatiable need for power. Just look at the Robin Hood Foundation as an example. It belongs to a group of billionaires and its mission is to privatize public education. If you look closely though they are really stealing from the poor to give to the rich. By privatizing education, they are getting rid of solid middle class jobs and replacing them with transient, non union, poorly-paid workers. The kids will receive a watered-down education, and the rich will pocket the billions of tax dollars

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  3. It is the same story in Newark. Incidents are vastly under reported.

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  4. Wonder what can be done about the time that a principal grabbed a bullhorn from a school aide, hurting the aide's arm, in a lunchroom with a room full of adults and children. Imagine that there was silence in the room as the principal screamed at the aide to get out. Later, in retaliation, every employee who wrote a witness statement about what happened was subsequently accused of an act of corporal punishment by the principal. All of the letters given to DC 37 employees were thrown out because DC 37 retains the right to grieve a letter to the file. The sole teacher who filed a witness statement was eventually brought up on 3020a charges, and is now an ATR.
    This incident was never reported on ORRs. Do you think DiNapoli would want to know about this, too?

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  5. Calling out the press corps on this one. Many instances of crimes and of employee abuse were, in fact, reported -at least to the press. Bloomberg's minions, pointing in part to their precious little 'reporting' systems, and having the press in their back pocket for much of his three terms, convinced the press to simply not care and simply not report it.
    Given the anecdotal info that was out there at the time, this 'news' of under reporting is clearly nothing new. Anyone on the beat at time heard the complaints and simply didn't flow through enough to connect the dots.

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  6. Did Bloomberg also cover up the number of murders? If you saw The Wire, there were all those missing bodies in concrete in boarded up houses. Look under those big condo towers going up.

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