Saturday, October 22, 2011

vindication on crime counting

NEW YORK CRIME STATS ARE CONCOCTIONS

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

October 22, 2011

Today on “This American Life,” most of the program was about how from roll call to the very top of the NYPD, since its inception in 1994, the much touted crime reporting system known as COMPSTAT is bogus. The TAL segment is essentially an interview with former officer Adrian Schoolcraft and playing of clips of the recordings he made from when he was first ordered at roll call to make numbers on summonses to how senior commanders have him taken away to a psychiatric ward. It’s quite a drama.

I googled Adrian Schoolcraft and found this NYT story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10quotas.html?pagewanted=all

In “Living Criminologically with Naked Emperors” (http://critcrim.org/critpapers/pepinsky1.pdf) first published in the Criminal Justice Policy Review in 2000, I argued that COMPSTAT’s reputed success in controlling crime in New York was a well-established pattern of focusing on arrests and downgrading or not recording crime. I feel vindicated. Schoolcraft that my speculation was entirely correct. As far as I can see, police crime recording always has been and always be politically corrupt, transparently so from the outset. Love and peace, hal

2 comments:

  1. The NYT article only scratches the surface of the story corroborated by Schoolcraft's covert tapes of fabricating public order arrests on one hand and burying and discouraging serious offense reports on the other, in the TAL segment this week at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent .

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  2. A transcript of the TAL interview on COMPSTAT is at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/transcript .

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