O'Malley cooking the books in Baltimore?

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ApexinM3

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Hi all,
I just was chatting with a friend who happens to be on the Balt. City Police and the subject of O'Malley came up. They said (not he/she, I don't want to roll on my source here) that the murder rate is calculated not by how many bodies, but rather incidents. This comes from the Assistant States Attorny, who is Joseph Curran-which is related to O'Malley.

For example: say 4 persons were in a store & someone came in to rob the place but wound up executing all 4 people in said store. Apparently, that would constitute only 1 murder, not 4. This, in turn, keeps the number of murders down. I was also told that arresting officers were encouraged NOT to right up too many category/article 1 incidents, so as not to have a high crime rate and therefore making the crime rate appear lower.

Can anybody verify this? If this is true, this makes O'Malley look great on paper by decieving the populace. And leaves me severely disturbed. Man, I hate this state more and more...:fire: :fire:
 
Sadly, this isn't the first time I've heard of this policy. The other times I had just dismissed it as exactly what you stated-perfidious (which, btw, I hadn't heard in quite some time-nice busting out the scrabble word!) But because it was coming from someone I've known since I was 12, I'm inclined to take their word for it. I do realize humans are not infalible, so that is why I was asking.

But I do see your point, though.
 
I believe they've been doing something of the sort in London to manipulate crime statistics - perhaps some of our Brit THR members can confirm or contradict this based on their own first hand knowledge.
 
In Detroit, back in the bad, old, days of King Coleman Young's reign, the Mayor's office put pressure on area hospitals to write up death by gunshot as a cardiac arrest. Thus, if the individual died in the hospital, it wasn't because of a GSW, it was a heart attack (someone attacked their heart with a gun). The mere fact that cardiac arrest was caused by internal bleeding secondary to being shot was never mentioned.
 
I don't think even O'Malley could get away with that. They have to report to the FBI Unform Statistics, and they would not stand for it. BPD is often accused of cooking crime stats in the city, but murder stats are too sensitive.

Also, Joe Curran is not an "Assistant District Attorney". He is The Attorney General of Maryland ~ certainly no friend of Maryland gun owners. His daughter, Kate, is a District Court Judge in Baltimore City, and is O'Malley's wife. Curran is not re-running for Attorney General in November - according to media reports, he is not running so that he can put time in to O'Malley's campaign for Govener.

John
 
I have no way to confirm the information, so take it as you see fit.
Click to expand...

Pro Gun Progressive is run by user here, who also happens to be very active in MD gun rights.
 
I don't think even O'Malley could get away with that. They have to report to the FBI Unform Statistics, and they would not stand for it. BPD is often accused of cooking crime stats in the city, but murder stats are too sensitive
Click to expand...
Actually, you don't HAVE to report to the UCR, and surprise of surprises, MD doesn't. (edit: actually they do, but MD's been lambasted for the idiosyncrasies in their crime reporting)

I don't think MOM is doing this particular bamboozle, but in short--you're right! He didn't get away with it. The local WBAL reporter Jayne Miller has been all over him about the way they're cooking the books on crime.

MOM has patterned himself as the uber-crime fighter. As the Baltimore crime stats weren't getting any better, he decided to cook the books to try and improve his image for the upcoming election. That they're doing THAT has been well documented. They're not doing exactly what the original poster described, but they are underreporting various sorts of crime intentionally, and have been called on it. It is something of a scandal here.
 
Hi all,
I just wanted to say I had just heard this, and was looking to you all to confirm this. I know the masses on THR care not for MOM (myself included), so curiousity bit me. Frankly I don't trust the SOB, and if he does make it into office, well, my days in MD will be numbered.

Thanks to all who have offered up some references as opposed to conjecture, this at least gets me pointed in the right direction.
 
I know of one other trick that Balto Ciyt uses. Lets says someone was murdered in the city but transported to the county and dumped...the county takes the hit and not the city.
 
Underreporting appears to be a common practice. I just saw the following article in today's Washington Post. I'll save you the trouble of registering and post it.

INVESTIGATION
Police Reclassify 119 Injury Reports as Crimes
65 Deemed Felonies in Review Stemming From New York Times Reporter's Fatal Attack

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 2, 2006; Page B04

The D.C. police department's internal affairs investigators have found that 119 cases last year were not properly classified as robberies or other crimes, Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday.

Authorities are reviewing cases that were classified in police reports as involving "injured persons" to determine whether they should have been treated as crimes. Ramsey said the department is examining reports taken in 2005 and the first three months of this year.

Speaking on Washington Post Radio, Ramsey said that investigators were almost done, having gone through 1,200 reports. They pulled 300 that looked suspicious, he said. Of those, 119 were officially reclassified as crimes -- 65 as felonies and 54 as misdemeanors.

Most of the felonies were assaults, Ramsey said; three were robberies.

"That equates to less than 1 percent of the felonies in the District," he said. This practice "really doesn't change the numbers."

The investigation began last month after revelations that police initially misclassified two robberies last fall as incidents involving injured persons, not as crimes. Detectives also failed to promptly investigate the muggings, even though both victims said they were beaten and robbed.

Authorities said the two robberies could be linked to the Jan. 6 fatal attack on New York Times reporter David E. Rosenbaum.

The D.C. inspector general's office has launched a probe into a series of mistakes by police and emergency workers who failed to immediately recognize that Rosenbaum was a crime victim. Rosenbaum, 63, was beaten on the head with a pipe and robbed near his home in the 3800 block of Gramercy Street NW.

He died at Howard University Hospital two days later from a severe head injury. Within days of the killing, police arrested Michael C. Hamlin, 23, and his cousin Percy Jordan, 42, on charges of first-degree murder. They have pleaded not guilty.

The victims of the earlier robberies said that officers could have made arrests before Rosenbaum was attacked if they had investigated the previous assaults. It was only after Rosenbaum's death, when the victims pushed police to take action, that those cases were followed.

One of the robberies took place Oct. 5 at 10th and M streets NW. The other occurred Nov. 17, when a man broke into a house in the 1500 block of U Street SE and beat a carpenter working in the home.

D.C. Council members Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) and Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) asked Ramsey last month for copies of the 2005 injury reports so they could look for patterns of officers downgrading crimes to help downsize the city's published crime rate.

The reclassified reports were found all over the city, with the most in the 7th Police District in Southeast Washington, Ramsey said.

"This is either a training issue or just a lack of follow-up on the part of detectives," Ramsey said.
 
If I remember right, it was a couple of years ago the British press reported that the government was cooking the books on violent crimes. For instance, as reported above, someone stabbed or shot who died later in the hospital wasn't classified as a 'murder' so it wouldn't go on the records as such.
 
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