IGX

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.
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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

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magaz ... ime-rates/

Interesting article-- crime, politicians, and reporters. Makes you wonder how common this is.

A series of articles in the Village Voice about the same sort of thing in NYC:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-03-07/ ... rmed/full/

Funny you should mention The Wire. When the Baltimore mayor (now Gov) that Carcetti is pretty obviously based on was mayor there was a call to audit the crime stats, which he resisted. When he became Gov, in the race to replace him as mayor, a popular city councilman based part of his crime agenda on auditing the crime stats, which was promptly the end of his campaign.

There were reports/speculation in some media about how Baltimore could have declines in violent crimes but not homicide. The implied theory was it was easy to hush up a rape or assault in the data but harder to hide a body. Concurrent, perhaps related item around the same time was that of the causes of death a coroner uses, Baltimore's proportion of "other" was wildly higher than the norm for a city of it's size. Implication was pressure was being applied to the coroner to lower murder rate when "Carcetti" was running for Gov.

Begs the question: are these CrimeStat programs for managing crime or managing the crime data.

Oh and "Carcetti" is running for president next.

Maybe Hamsterdam was a good idea.