NEW YORK – City officials have changed the way they report the official toll of dead and missing at the World Trade Center in hopes of improving accuracy.
The official count stood at 3,646 on Friday, which includes people on the ground and those aboard the two hijacked planes that hit the twin towers Sept. 11. The number reflects a drop of more than 250 from the beginning of the week – and close to 3,000 from its high in September.
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The city's new reporting method relies strictly on death certificates and a list of missing persons. It replaces a system that included the number of "identified dead" – a category that city officials said led to duplications and contradictions.
As of Friday, the medical examiner's office had issued 443 death certificates, based on identifications made from remains. Another 1,820 death certificates have been issued at the request of victims' families in a streamlined process that doesn't require a body.
The remaining 1,383 people in the tally are listed simply as missing – a number likely to drop as death certificates are issued, or duplications and errors are resolved.
"What the new numbers basically do is to try to simplify it," Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told reporters.
The New York Police Department will maintain the missing persons list, as it has since the attacks, said Richard Sheirer, director of the mayor's Office of Emergency Management.
The difference is in how the city is categorizing the dead.
Previously, the city reported a number of missing and a number of identified dead. But the identified dead was not based solely on death certificates and usually included about 150 more than what the city medical examiner counted. The disparity was due mostly to different identification procedures.
Police investigators use "a police standard," such as remains found with clothing or an identification card, while the medical examiner relies on scientific evidence. Now, the city will not use the police standard in reporting the official tally, Deputy Police Commissioner Thomas Antenen said.
"That way it'll be consistent, so we don't have these different numbers," Sheirer said. "We're going to get them all from a single source, so we're talking with one mouth."
Independent tallies maintained by news organizations have consistently been lower than the city's estimates of the toll. An ongoing Associated Press tally of persons confirmed dead and those reported dead or missing stood at 2,772 on Friday.
AP's figure is derived from information provided by the medical examiner, those declared dead by a court, funeral homes, places of worship, death notices, employers, public agencies, families and AP's foreign bureaus.
In addition to the dead and missing in New York, 189 people died in Arlington – 125 in the Pentagon and 64 people on the plane that crashed into it – and 44 people on a plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, bringing the total to 3,879.
