The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  However, every Chicago police leader, officer, and administrator with whom we spoke says that hasn’t been the department’s practice. It’s not a murder until the injured person dies, they point out. Before then, it’s an aggravated battery. “CPD is interpreting the state guidelines incorrectly,” says an expert source on Chicago Police Department statistics. “It’s a numbers game.”

  Welcome to the Dali-esque world of Chicago crime reporting.

  No matter who you believe, it’s clear that the department did change the way in which it counts delayed homicides—but only for the years in which McCarthy has been in charge. It subtracted four murders from the 2013 total, according to Collins. And it subtracted seven murders from 2012, five in which the injuries occurred in 2011.

  Did the department add back those five murders to 2011? It doesn’t appear so. Remember that there were 435 homicides in 2011, according to the 2012 year-end CompStat report. But at presstime, the City of Chicago’s own public data portal listed only 434 homicides in 2011.

  How is it fair to compare 2013’s homicide totals with those of years before the department changed the rules of the game? It’s not, according to John Eterno, a former NYPD cop and Comp-Stat expert, now a professor of criminal justice at Molloy College in Long Island. “You can’t compare over the years when you do things like that,” he says.

  All of this creative number crunching, former police officials say, is a radical departure from past practices. Veteran members of the force blame McCarthy. Muddling murder statistics “benefits no one but the superintendent,” says the retired high-level detective. “Not the citizens, not the investigators. It only benefits him.”

  It certainly doesn’t benefit the victims’ families. “I cry many days and many nights,” says Alice Groves, whose daughter Tiara has been dead for eight months. “It makes me feel like they are trying to sweep this under the covers. They want to look good. They want the city to look good. But they ain’t thinking about the family who lost their loved one.”

  New Year’s revelry was still in full swing on January 1, 2014, when the Chicago Police Department sent out an e-mail blast just after two a.m. The subject line: “Chicago Ends 2013 at Historic Lows in Crime and Violence, More Work Remains.”

  Despite the measured tone of that last phrase, the chest thumping was deafening: “fewest murders since 1965”; “lowest murder rate since 1966”; “lowest overall crime rate since 1972”; “fewest robberies, burglaries, motor vehicle thefts and arsons in recorded history.” And on and on, percentage after percentage, statistic after statistic after statistic.

  But try this: Add back the ten cases Chicago found that, if classified as sources say they should have been, would have counted as homicides. (There may be more.) Add back the four homicides that occurred on Chicago’s expressways. Add, too, the four delayed homicides that the department had stripped out in December. What you get is not 414 murders in 2013, but at least 432.

  What you also get is the kind of public record that every Chicagoan deserves. Not to mention the knowledge that police are doing their jobs. The killers of Tiara Groves, Tiffany Jones, Maurice Harris, Michelle Manalansan, Millicent Brown-Johnson, Jovan Perkins, and Patrick Walker may remain on the streets. As long as their deaths are not considered homicides, that’s unlikely to change, detectives say.

  Saddest of all, perhaps, the victims’ grieving families and friends are left with the belief that the system is profoundly unjust. “I wake up every day and I know my son and my son’s mom were murdered,” says Austin Perkins, Jovan’s father. “I just don’t understand how police can categorize it the way they are categorizing it. I just want answers. I just want justice.

  “You can’t go around setting buildings on fire and killing people and not be held accountable.”

  II. Getting Washed

  In the first half of 2013, as the thermometer began to rise, so did the anxiety of those living in the Chicago Police Department’s Nineteenth District. The district’s neighborhoods—Lake View, Boystown, Wrigleyville, and North Center, plus portions of Uptown and Lincoln Square and the north part of Lincoln Park—are among the most desirable in the city. But residents were increasingly sharing horror stories about robberies, beatings, deals, and bloodstains on previously safe sidewalks. “I moved here in 1981, and I have never felt as unsafe as I do now,” Lake View resident Michael Smith, fifty-six, an art director at a marketing firm, told Chicago last fall.

  In fact, in the months of May, June, and July, one of the police beats within the Nineteenth District—a small area bordered by Belmont Avenue, Addison Street, Halsted Street, and South-port Avenue—notched more robberies than any other beat in Chicago, according to the police’s own statistics. The beat also ranked among the ten worst, citywide, for violent crime. “Does it compare to what’s happening on the South and West Sides of the city? No,” says Craig Nolden, a forty-five-year-old marketing manager who lives with his wife and two children in the beat. “But it was out of control.”

  Last summer, Nolden says, he called 911 four times: to report someone breaking in to his wife’s car, a couple brawling in a park, a fight outside his home, and someone dealing drugs nearby. In every case, by the time police arrived, the bad guys had departed. In the case of the drug deal, twenty minutes passed before cops showed up, Nolden says. When he asked them what took so long, the officers said they were answering another call, for an attempted apartment burglary. “I said, ‘With all due respect, are we in a take-a-number situation?’ And the officer said, ‘It’s such a colossally bad issue, I can’t give you an explanation.’”

  But even as Nineteenth District residents remained on high alert for a roving group of thugs who were threatening victims with a hammer, police leaders were assuring them that all was well. In fact, according to reports posted by the Chicago Police Department on its website each week, crime was consistently down nearly 20 percent in the district compared with the same weeks in the previous summer.

  Frightened and frustrated residents started packing formerly quiet community-policing sessions. “You would go to these meetings with the [police] commander and alderman, and there was a complete denial that anything was happening,” Smith says incredulously. “They would tell us it was all our perception and point to statistics.… You have no idea how furious that makes people.”

  By the time 2013 ended, according to the police department’s count, the number of “index crimes”—the key crimes that virtually all cities report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation—had dropped 17 percent for the year. “You can say your statistics are down,” says Sarah Gottesman, thirty-six, a food-company brand manager who moved to Lake View three years ago, after which one friend got her wallet snatched, another had a bike stolen, and a neighbor’s apartment was burglarized. “But that doesn’t mean the crime didn’t happen.”

  North Siders aren’t the only ones worked up about the disconnect between what Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy have claimed about falling crime and what they believe has actually been happening in their neighborhoods. Carrie Austin, the alderman of the Thirty-Fourth Ward on the Far South Side—which includes Roseland, one of the city’s highest-crime neighborhoods told a Sun-Times reporter in January: “Don’t tell me about no statistics of McCarthy’s. You say, ‘Well, statistically, we’re down.’ That means crap to me when I know that someone else has been shot.”

  Murders grab the headlines. But they make up less than 1 percent of the total number of crimes committed. So when Emanuel and McCarthy talk about the huge drop in crime since they took over in May 2011, they’re referring mostly to reductions in the number of break-ins, car thefts, muggings, sexual assaults, and the like—the kinds of crimes much more likely to befall the typical Chicagoan.

  “You can have a 100 percent reduction in murders, and as sad as this may sound, it won’t have anywhere near the effect [on the overall statistics] of a 25 or 30 percent drop in burglaries,” says Jody Weis, Chicago’s police c
hief from 2008 to early 2011. “If you’re looking at driving down crime, property crimes are the ones that are going to make a big difference.”

  And as far as public perception is concerned, no property crimes are more important than those tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its Uniform Crime Report. Of the hundreds of crimes on the books, the FBI compiles data from virtually every U.S. city on just four property crimes (burglaries, thefts, motor vehicle thefts, and incidents of arson) and four violent crimes (homicides, criminal sexual assaults, aggravated batteries/assaults, and robberies).

  The level of index crime in a city is widely viewed as a gauge of its safety—essentially, its crime report card. “[Low crime] figures serve a political end,” says Eli Silverman, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “It brings in tourism; it’s good for business.”

  As mentioned in part 1 of this report, which focused on homicides, from 1993 through 2010 the average annual decline in the number of index crimes in Chicago was less than 4 percent. If you go to the police department’s website and compare the index crime totals for 2010 (found in that year’s annual report) with the totals in the 2013 year-end CompStat report (more on that later), you’ll see a drop of 56 percent, or 19 percent per year on average. It’s akin to a chronically mediocre student all of a sudden earning straight As.

  The plunge hasn’t happened in just a few parts of the city, either. Index crimes have dropped sharply in all 22 police districts. In 20 of them, in fact, the total number committed in 2013 was a mere one-half to one-third the number committed in 2010, according to police figures.

  Of all index crimes, motor vehicle thefts have plunged most. Over the past three calendar years, they’re down 35 percent, again according to the department’s own statistics. (They fell 23 percent last year alone.) Over that same three-year period, burglaries fell 33 percent; aggravated batteries, 20 percent; robberies, 16 percent.

  Current and former officers and several criminologists say they can’t understand how a cash-strapped and undermanned department—one that by its own admission has been focusing most of its attention and resources on combating shootings and murders and protecting schoolchildren in a few very violent neighborhoods—could achieve such astounding results. “God Almighty! It’s just not possible,” opines a retired high-ranking officer who reviewed the department’s statistics.

  To get to the bottom of the numbers, Chicago studied police reports and court documents, examined the department’s internal and publicly available crime data, and interviewed more than seventy crime victims, neighborhood activists, criminologists, and former and current police sources. (Officers agreed to speak only if their names were withheld, some citing fears of retaliation.) We also reviewed a recently released audit by the city’s office of the inspector general that found the police department failed to report nearly a quarter of aggravated assaults and aggravated batteries in 2012, based on the cases surveyed.

  Together, this information shows what Smith, Gottesman, and countless Chicagoans have been saying all along: The city’s crime numbers seem too good to be true. One former lieutenant has a name for the system: the washing machine. “They wash and rinse the numbers,” the lieutenant says.

  Documents and interviews reveal how this may be happening. First, on McCarthy’s watch, the department quietly changed several bedrock crime-reporting and scoring policies. For example, in the statistics it compiles and shares with the public on its web-site each week, it stopped including certain crimes that had been counted in the past.

  Second, many police sources say they have been pressured by superiors—explicitly and implicitly—to underreport crime. There are, according to an expert source on the department’s statistics, potentially “a million tiny ways to do it”—including misclassifying and downgrading offenses, counting multiple incidents as single events, and making it more difficult for people to report crimes or actively discouraging them from doing so.

  Finally, some of the drop is simply a byproduct of reduced manpower. Many officers say that their ranks have become so depleted that they can’t respond to all 911 calls. It’s like the proverbial tree falling in the empty forest: no victim, no report, no crime.

  Since Chicago published part 1 of this special report, many current and former police officers have contacted us to share “washing machine”–like stories. Crime victims, too, have come forward to describe Kafkaesque dealings with police. And two aldermen—Scott Waguespack, from the North Side’s Thirty-Second Ward, and Willie Cochran, from the South Side’s Twentieth Ward—have introduced resolutions in the City Council calling for hearings on the reliability of the department’s crime counting and reporting practices. At press time, more than a third of Chicago’s fifty aldermen had signed.

  “The allegations [in part 1 of the special report] are false, and built on information that is factually incorrect, misleading, and unsubstantiated,” police department spokesperson Adam Collins said in a statement. “We take the tracking, compiling, and reporting of crime data extremely seriously … and [it] is shared with the public to provide an accurate understanding of crime conditions.” (While Superintendent McCarthy did not agree to an interview, Collins sent McCarthy’s answers to a few of our questions via e-mail on May 2, just before press time for this article. Mayor Emanuel did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

  Such allegations are far from new. Police departments around the country didn’t start collecting and reporting crime statistics until the 1920s. And it didn’t take long for accusations to arise that the numbers were being manipulated. A 1926 Chicago Daily Tribune investigation revealed that the police department was “covering up on the real crime situation” by “doctoring the books.” The paper found that only 60 percent of the burglaries, thefts, and “stickups” made it into the department’s public report.

  So the scandals went, flaring up and then dying down every two or three decades. By 1958, the Chicago Crime Commission was accusing police of “minimizing” the city’s crime numbers. Timothy Sheehan, a former Republican congressman who ran for mayor in 1959 against Richard J. Daley, described the numbers as a “farce”: “What man with brains can believe [them]?”

  In 1982, Channel 2 investigative reporter Pam Zekman unearthed evidence that the department had been “killing crime” for years by dismissing legitimate crime reports as unfounded. She reported that it undercounted robberies and burglaries by one-third or more and rapes by nearly one-half. The ensuing scandal led to an FBI review, which concluded that Chicago police were fourteen times more likely to deem crime reports “unfounded” than were police in at least thirty other big cities.

  Admitted Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police chief at the time: “There were, in fact, problems in the integrity of our reporting system.” Lo and behold, when the department released its new figures for the first four months of 1983, the numbers shot skyward: burglaries and robberies up 23 percent, thefts up 30 percent, rapes up nearly 50 percent.

  Inaccuracies are hardly a Chicago-specific phenomenon. In the recent past, police departments in many other big cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., to name a few—have admitted to fudging the numbers. Each of those cases can be traced to the pressures of various versions of one system: CompStat.

  A comprehensive method of mapping and recording crime patterns and data, CompStat was rolled out in 1994 in New York City by its police commissioner, William Bratton. The process involves weekly meetings in which top brass grill field commanders about what they’re doing to solve crime problems in their areas. Garry McCarthy, a Bronx-born detective’s son, would eventually run the NYPD’s CompStat meetings as the deputy commissioner of operations, holding commanders’ feet to the fire at any sign that crime in their districts wasn’t heading downward.

  After CompStat’s launch, New York’s crime numbers plummeted. Copycat systems quickly sprang up across the country. Police Superi
ntendent Terry Hillard introduced a CompStat-like system in Chicago in early 2000; his successors Phil Cline and Jody Weis put in place their own variations. Nearly two decades after CompStat was born, about 80 percent of the nation’s major police departments had adopted some variation of the system, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank.

  But New York’s CompStat program was dogged by talk that its numbers weren’t all that they seemed. In May 2010—four years after McCarthy left the NYPD to become the top cop in Newark, New Jersey—the Village Voice published excerpts of transcripts from hundreds of audio recordings of station-house roll calls from 2008 and 2009 made by an officer in the Eighty-First Precinct, in Brooklyn’s tough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. NYPD bosses were caught on tape pressuring street cops to downgrade crimes and discourage victims from reporting offenses, among other things, to bolster the precinct’s stats. An outside report ordered by former police commissioner Raymond Kelly would confirm that manipulation went well beyond one precinct and “may have an appreciable effect on certain reported crime rates.”

  In their 2012 book The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation, Silverman and John Eterno, a former NYPD captain who is now a professor of criminal justice at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York, describe how over time data-driven policing turned the NYPD to the dark side. “Initially, they started off with all the good intentions in the world, but then the political pressures and the pressures from the top became so great that they changed,” explains Eterno. “When the pressure comes from the political powers, it is very difficult for honest working police officers to battle that.”