Who knew that political chicanery traveled down Route 66?
You may recall (and I wrote about) how Barack Obama’s own Windy City was cooking their crime statistics books. Violence is so routine in Chicago, and the politicians there are so determined to distort that fact, that they apparently resorted to reclassifying violent crimes as lesser offenses in order to artificially deflate their soaring violence statistics.
More bluntly stated, they couldn’t control local thugs, so they demoted murders, rapes and assaults almost down to the same class of crime as jay-walking.
Now we learn that the City of Angels is doing the same thing!
I don’t know if political corruption or hyper-violent regions cause politicians to cheat and deceive their taxpayers, but on both ends of Route 66 they are actively doing so. According to the Los Angeles Times, in one year, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) misclassified over 1,200 violent crimes as much lesser issues, including a spate of stabbings, beatings and robberies. Most of these offenses were aggravated assaults, which had they been correctly classified would have dragged L.A.’s rate of such violence up an additional 14%. All forms of violent crime would have climbed 7%.
Some in local government tried to write-off the statistical offenses as clerical mishaps. But 1,200 misclassified aggravated assaults out of the official reported 8,329 is not a simple clerical error. It is well above even cultural sloppiness. LAPD cops, speaking on the sly, told reporters as much. “Every little game like this has been tried over the years … All of a sudden, we’re going to put somebody in jail for theft, but we’ll call it something else [embezzlement]?”
A retired LAPD officer said “Whenever you reported a serious crime, they would find any way possible to make it a minor crime … We were spending all this time addressing what the crime should be called, instead of dealing with the crime itself. It’s ridiculous.”
The real gotcha is that statistics were only skewed in one direction. The LAPD misreported many serious crimes as minor, but very few minor crimes were recorded as serious. This is where the official “explanation” unravels. Under normal human-error circumstances, and even with the help of officers administering their preferred wrist-slaps and over-charges, the number of elevated and depressed charges would roughly come out equal. In L.A. however, the result was almost always to make a serious crime into a minor one.
After getting caught, the LAPD put new reporting “standards” in place that caused their recalculated aggravated assaults count to climb 12% in the first half of 2014 compared to the same period in 2013. Oh, and there is going to be an “investigation.”
The fact is that Big City mayors and their cronies don’t care about the truth, just what they can say at election time. But since crime in general, and violent crime in particular, haunts poorer neighborhoods, these misclassified assaults robbed poor folk of resources and justice that they need to exist.
The lies also robbed the taxpayers of living in safer cities. Luckily, LAPD knows how to fight increasing violent crime rates – like the serious crimes recently uncovered; More gun bans. Right?
