Cooking the books LAPD style

Mind you, this is the same LAPD that refuses to issue CCWs to mere peasants interested in self defense…

LAPD underreported serious assaults, skewing crime stats for 8 years

The Los Angeles Police Department misclassified an estimated 14,000 serious assaults as minor offenses in a recent eight-year period, artificially lowering the city’s crime levels, a Times analysis found.

With the incidents counted correctly, violent crime in the city was 7% higher than the LAPD reported in the period from 2005 to fall 2012, and the number of serious assaults was 16% higher, the analysis found.

…

The errors occurred during a time when the LAPD was reporting major drops in crime across the city. The Times analysis found the misclassified cases were not numerous enough to alter the overall downward trend.

Still, the findings are a mark against a department that has long been viewed as a national leader in using data to help deploy officers and set crime-fighting targets. When Mayor Eric Garcetti took office in 2013, he held up the LAPD’s data-tracking system as a model the rest of city government should emulate.

The Los Angeles Times

One wonders if the department would have added the secret sauce to their crime stats if a Hollywood A-lister or two got caught up in the mislabeled crimes. And now that I see that thought in writing, I wonder if they added the secret sauce because a Hollywood A-lister was caught up in one of the mislabeled crimes!