By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--April 22, 2014
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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." Granted, a few dozen crimes constitute a tiny percentage of the more than 300,000 reported in Chicago last year. But sources describe a practice that has become widespread at the same time that top police brass have become fixated on demonstrating improvement in Chicago's woeful crime statistics.If official police statistics are to be believed, violent crimes have declined by an average of 19 percent each of the past four years, after declining an average of only 4 percent for each of the 16 years prior to that - even as the number of cops on the street has declined 10 percent. Is that even remotely plausible? The city's own inspector general doesn't think so, and recently released a study of the department's 2012 crime stats that indicates at the very least a 24 percent undercounting of assaults and batteries. And it's hard to square this purported trend with what happened over Easter weekend, when shootings got so out of control that they prompted the FBI to establish a violent crime unit just for Chicago. So why would city leaders fudge the numbers? Where would they get such an idea? Well, let's see: Rahm Emanuel became mayor in 2011. What is his background? It is not so much in governing as it is operating as a bare-knuckled political operative - and make no mistake, that's what you do when you serve as chief of staff in the Obama White House. By the way, whether it's unemployment figures or ObamaCare enrollment numbers, the Obama White House from which Emanuel came is certainly not averse to faking numbers if it serves to benefit them politically. Of course, you could argue that this has nothing to do with the White House because political corruption has always been the Chicago Way. Then again, you could recall that it is Chicago from which Barack Obama came.
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