After Reporting Drop, Police Cite 9% Rise
By Allison Klein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Violent crime in the District jumped nearly 9 percent last year, the latest police statistics show -- a big turnabout from earlier claims that the numbers had dropped from the previous year.
Police revised the yearly crime tally after turning up major discrepancies in their crime databases, officials revealed yesterday. An internal review uncovered crimes that were misclassified or not counted, officials said.
The new figures show significant increases in assaults and robberies, in marked contrast to the preliminary tallies released at year's end. Police officials first flagged questions about the record-keeping last summer and have been working to reconcile the numbers. But they made no mention of these problems when they provided the rosier crime outlook in December.
Police now say that aggravated assaults jumped 15.5 percent and that robberies rose nearly 3 percent. They earlier had said that assault totals remained level and that robberies dropped by 5 percent.
At the end of 2006, outgoing police chief Charles H. Ramsey was taking credit for bucking a national trend of increased violent crime.
The updated totals are still preliminary, officials said, and are subject to change as the review continues.
Although homicides are at a 21-year low, other street crimes are rising. Many D.C. residents have called for a stronger police presence to combat muggings and other street attacks.
Police officials provided the new statistics yesterday after receiving inquiries from The Washington Post.
Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who took office in late December, said that the review is continuing but that she does not believe there is any impropriety in the undercounting of criminal offenses.
But Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police Labor Committee, said he believes Ramsey's administration intentionally gave residents the impression that the city was safer than it was.
"They were playing with the numbers. Sooner or later, it catches up," Baumann said. "You're going to find a lot of manipulation and cherry-picking of numbers."
In an interview last night, Ramsey, who was chief for nearly nine years, defended his tenure, saying he made sure an audit system was in place to catch any errors.
"This shows our system works," Ramsey said. "It is a good safeguard for accuracy."
The police department's research unit identified the problems, according to its director, Anne Grant. After reviewing stacks of written reports and matching them against the crime database, the unit found that large numbers of crimes were missing, Grant said.
"We're not sure why," Grant said.
Four audits in the past year have found thousands of discrepancies that are still being sorted out, she said.
In January, the department provided statistics showing that the number of violent offenses in 2006 was down 2.4 percent from the previous year.
The new totals continue to show a 14 percent drop in homicides and a 10 percent increase in sexual assaults, as previously reported.
The revised tally shows 4,453 aggravated assaults -- attacks, usually with a weapon, that are meant to cause severe bodily injury -- compared with 3,854 in 2005. And officials now say that the city had 3,604 robberies in 2006, up from 3,502 the previous year.
The revised numbers still pale in comparison with the volume of crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crack cocaine was blamed for a surge in bloodshed. The city had 169 homicides last year, compared with 479 in 1991.
Lanier and other officials said the record-keeping problems stem in part from the department's use of two databases for crime statistics.
One database relies on clerks in each police district to input information at 4 a.m. each day. It is used by officials to form crime strategies and is also the information released to the public.
The second is maintained in a more methodical way, with researchers entering information from written police reports weeks or months after crimes occur. That database is kept to report information to the FBI each year.
One of Lanier's priorities is to automate police reports, eliminating paper, with one master database tracking crimes.
Once that system is in place, Lanier said, the information will be more accurate.
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