At first, Eterno and Silverman say, producing steep declines is easy. Silverman compares the process to squeezing an orange. “It’s very easy to extract the juice when the orange is new,” he says. “But there is a point where it’s more and more difficult. So you have to be more creative.”
In early 2011, Mayor-elect Emanuel went hunting for a new top cop who would help him fulfill his campaign promise of reducing crime. He selected McCarthy, extolling his numbers-driven approach to policing. McCarthy brought to Chicago both Comp-Stat and his friend and former NYPD colleague Robert Tracy to run it.
Before McCarthy’s arrival, the Chicago Police Department classified and reported incidents in just one way. The numbers that it shared with the public—for example, in clear, detailed annual reports—were the same ones it gave to the state of Illinois and the FBI every month for their Uniform Crime Reporting programs. (Very slight variances between those numbers can exist if the department reclassified cases after it released the annual report but before it submitted the year’s numbers for the UCR.)
Now the department essentially keeps two sets of books. One follows FBI rules for what crimes to count and how to count them. The other—in CompStat—doesn’t always. “CompStat is created by the administration for their own purposes, to do their own analysis,” explains the expert source on the department’s statistics. “They collect whatever data they want, they use it however they want to use it, and they don’t have to tell anybody [what data they’re collecting or how they’re doing the counting].”
For example, McCarthy’s administration doesn’t include arson in CompStat reports. Spokesman Collins did not directly answer repeated requests as to why but did tell us that the department supplies arson figures for the Uniform Crime Report. The FBI’s 2011 and 2012 UCR reports, however, have blank spaces where Chicago’s arson figures should be. “Chicago arson counts were incomplete for those years,” explains an FBI spokesperson.
Now take the assault-related crime category. It includes thirty-four classifications, from aggravated domestic batteries to nonfatal shootings, based on the severity of the injury (or threat of injury), the kind of weapon, and the location. The UCR programs for Illinois and the FBI require all types to be recorded and counted. But the police department doesn’t count all types in CompStat.
Look at theft, too. For decades, the department counted a theft as a theft. Stealing $1 was the same as stealing $1 million. That practice follows Uniform Crime Report guidelines, which clearly state: “Agencies must report all larceny offenses regardless of the value of the property stolen.”
But CompStat counts only felony thefts—that is, thefts of more than $500. The difference between the number of felony and non-felony thefts is huge. In 2010, the last full year before McCarthy took over, the department reported 74,764 thefts for the UCR. In 2011, under the CompStat system, the department’s year-end report listed just 15,665 thefts.
That same year, the department gave the FBI a theft number of 72,373. That works out to a theft reduction of a little over 3 percent from 2010 to 2011, right around the long-term annual average reduction before McCarthy arrived. But look at the CompStat numbers and you’d see almost 60,000 crimes effectively subtracted. Poof !
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that not counting nearly 60,000 index crimes can do wonders for a city’s overall crime rate. This accounting change helped drive the total number of index crimes from 152,031 in 2010 (according to the department’s annual report) to 86,174 in 2011 (according to CompStat).
Collins told Chicago that CompStat “is an internal tactical analysis and crime reduction strategy” and “is not a reporting mechanism in the way that UCR is.” However, McCarthy and Emanuel have used CompStat as the source of official statistics they give the press and the public, even elected officials.
For example, on October 31, when the superintendent appeared before the City Council for an annual budget hearing, Cochran asked him for crime statistics by ward. On November 22, McCarthy sent a memo to budget committee chairman Carrie Austin stating, “Crime statistics are not available by ward. They are available by district.” In an attachment, he included one week’s worth of CompStat reports for the city’s twenty-two districts and three areas, plus a citywide report. That’s right: He didn’t send UCR statistics. He sent CompStat statistics.
Emanuel and McCarthy have also compared CompStat crime data with pre-2011 crime data, a practice that Eterno says is “comparing apples and oranges.” Consider the department’s January 1 press release declaring, “Chicago Ends 2013 at Historic Lows in Crime and Violence.” It states, among other things, that “felony thefts were at the lowest level since 1972” and “both criminal sexual assualts and aggravated battery/assault [sic] were at the lowest level since 1982.” The year-over-year drops cited in the press release—down 23 percent in motor vehicle theft, 22 percent in burglary, and 18 percent in murder, for example—exactly mirror those in the 2013 year-end CompStat report. (The FBI has not yet made final UCR data available for 2013.)
By the way, the year-end CompStat report is one of the few that remains on the department’s website longer than seven days. Each week, the department typically replaces that week’s CompStat report with a new one, removing the old one from public view for good.
And what about those easy-to-understand annual reports that the department had been issuing since 1965? McCarthy discontinued them. Collins says there’s no longer a need for them, given that “we’ve increased data available to the public and put it right on our website.”
Well, not exactly. On the department’s home page (http://chicagopolice.org/; click on “Crime Statistics” in the News tab and what you’ll see are CompStat data. The numbers are helpfully crunched to show percentage changes in the frequency of seven crimes (representing all of the index crimes except for arson) over the past week, four weeks, one year, two years, and three years.
There is a more detailed public source of crime stats—not on the department’s website, but on the city’s. This data portal contains raw crime numbers in enormous spreadsheets—not exactly user-friendly. What’s more, nowhere will you find numbers of arrests, numbers of murders solved, or data on offender and victim gender, race, and age, for example, all of which had been included in the annual reports.
Finally, another significant discrepancy between CompStat data and FBI data is due to how the department counts cases in which there are multiple victims. Imagine that a group of thugs armed with baseball bats beats up three people walking along the street. Three victims, three incidents, according to state and federal guidelines. The inspector general’s audit found that the Chicago Police Department was counting such cases as only one incident. The result: The department had underreported assault cases by 24 percent in 2012, based on the sample cases reviewed.
Collins seemed to imply that McCarthy didn’t realize there was any problem: “The issue was brought to this administration’s attention during the course of [the] audit.” Noting that the previous administration failed to follow the guidelines, the department pledged to review all of the aggravated assault and battery cases from 2012 and 2013 to correct them.
Incidentally, McCarthy’s administration records data for shootings—a category he created in Chicago’s CompStat system—exactly the same way: by incident rather than by victim. For example, when thirteen people got shot in last September’s mass shooting at a pickup basketball game on the South Side, the department counted the shootings only once.
No wonder many in the police rank and file don’t trust the CompStat numbers. Just read some of the grousing on the widely read blog Second City Cop about “Con-stat,” “Compost,” and “Comcrap.”
Last winter, as the polar vortex hunkered down for a bone-chilling stay, an elderly woman heard a knock on the front door of her house on the Northwest Side. (She requested that her name be withheld, saying that she was afraid of angering police.) The woman peered out and saw a young man “who look
ed like Justin Bieber,” she says.
He seemed harmless enough, so she opened the door. “He asked me if I had seen his dog.” The woman told the Bieber doppelgänger she hadn’t seen the lost animal. But he kept standing there. “He wouldn’t go away,” she says. So she closed and locked the door and went upstairs to do some chores.
Soon after, she heard a loud noise coming from the first floor. She went downstairs to investigate and saw three men wearing black hoodies, their faces covered by scarves, creeping down her hallway. When the intruders saw her, they fled. “I went upstairs and called 911,” she says.
A few minutes later, the shaken woman heard two cops. They had come in through the back door, which the men had broken open. (The front door was still locked.)
The officers handed her a police report and left. Relieved that the whole thing was over, the homeowner tried her best to fix the back door. The men had ripped the frame from the wall, knocking off a metal plate. Wood chips littered the floor. “I got a mallet and a hammer and some wood putty, and it held pretty good,” she says.
On the report, police had recorded the incident as a case of criminal trespassing (which state law defines as entering private or public property after being told not to, either verbally or in a written notice). But a family friend pointed out that “they didn’t just walk in; they broke in.” That’s burglary: a forced or unlawful entry into a home, business, or garage with the intent to steal. It’s both a felony and an index crime. Trespassing isn’t either one.
Days later, when she called police to follow up, the woman reminded the officer that the three masked men had broken in through her locked back door. “I told them my report wasn’t complete, that there was nothing about the broken door,” she recalls. “He told me that it didn’t make a difference and just kept telling me to make sure my doors were locked.”
Sure enough, a second report mailed days after their conversation still read criminal trespassing, not burglary. At press time, that had not changed.
Veteran detectives who reviewed this case for Chicago were not surprised. “It’s become standard operating procedure,” says one sergeant. “Cops are being told by their supervisors to change things and change classifications. We have a lot of cases where a neighborhood is experiencing a rash of burglaries and the cases are basically being eliminated.”
Because the current Chicago Police Department culture is built on a wink-and-nod axiom that crime must only go down—and because careers are made or broken by good or bad “performance”—pressure to reduce crime numbers in this way has become acute at all levels. Patrol officers have to please sergeants; sergeants have to please lieutenants; lieutenants have to please captains; they all have to please district commanders; district commanders have to please the chiefs with the gold stars; and, of course, the superintendent has to keep his boss, the mayor, happy.
Much of the daily pressure lands on the beat cops on the bottom and the sergeants and lieutenants supervising them. Officers say the punishments for reporting numbers their supervisors don’t like can include denying time due, splitting up longtime partners, and changing shift times so that officers can’t make it to, say, their children’s Little League games.
Multiple officers have the power to downgrade a crime at just about any stage of the process. “It happens all the time,” says one detective. “It’s so easy.” First, the responding officer can intentionally misclassify a case or alter the narrative to record a lesser charge. A house break-in becomes “trespassing”; a garage break-in becomes “criminal damage to property”; a theft becomes “lost property.” The former lieutenant mentioned earlier calls this the “speed wash cycle”: Major crimes are immediately rinsed out of the stat books.
If the officer’s supervisor won’t accept the initial classification, the officer almost always has to change it. “What are you going to do?” says one patrol officer. Meaning: That’s how top-down command works.
Victims usually don’t find out about the reclassifications until later. Like the man we spoke to whose garage was set on fire but who later discovered that his case had been classified not as arson but as simple criminal damage to property—which is not an index crime. Or the college student who was knocked to the sidewalk and robbed of his phone and laptop, only to be told afterward by his insurance company that police reported his case as lost property. (The result: His insurer refused to cover it.)
Or the professor whose wallet was snatched out of her purse last winter when she was leaving a concert at Symphony Center with her husband, headed to their car in the underground garage at Grant Park. Her 911 call was routed to someone who “said he could not take a report until we first alerted the credit card company,” her husband says. “It sounded bizarre and, to us, irrelevant.”
But the couple did as they were told, then again called police. Weeks later, the department sent them a report categorizing the incident as lost property. “That struck me as very strange,” he continues. “It was clearly a criminal case.”
Later, their bank statement revealed that someone had somehow withdrawn $2,000 from their account. Now the original case report was becoming a serious issue. So the husband headed to the police district office and asked a desk officer to correct the original report, which the officer did. A copy provided to Chicago leaves little room for misunderstanding: “This was a theft, not a loss, and should be classified as such.”
Four months later, though, nothing has changed. At press time, the city’s data portal shows no such theft case.
While jogging near Montrose Beach on a beautiful day last fall, a twenty-something woman took a path to the bird sanctuary, a secluded area shrouded by trees, bushes, and brush. (Because of the nature of the crime, we are withholding her name.) Once she was out of sight of other parkgoers, a man appeared. Clutching his crotch, he lunged toward her and shoved his hand between her legs, grabbing her genitals.
Adrenaline surging, the woman punched him and then chased him as he ran away. “Stop him!” she yelled. But no one did. So she kept after the man until he reached the street, jumped into his car, and sped off. She called 911 on her cell phone and told the dispatcher everything, including the man’s license plate number. And she waited.
Half an hour went by, she says, before a Nineteenth District police officer arrived. “I told him my story,” she says. “And the officer says, ‘I want to catch this guy.’ And I said, ‘It’s been thirty minutes already. He’s gone.’”
That same fall, during a heated community meeting in which residents blasted the police department for failing to respond to crimes quickly enough, the Nineteenth District’s commander, Elias Voulgaris, gave an unusually candid speech that lasted nearly half an hour. Yes, Voulgaris said, he was short on cops. The district now had sixty-nine fewer beat cops than when he took over in August 2012. “I don’t think there is any district commander in this city who doesn’t want more officers,” he said.
Yes, on some days the district got so overwhelmed by 911 calls that his officers couldn’t get to crime scenes in a reasonable amount of time. “It’s a major concern,” he said. “It’s a major concern citywide and, yes, part of the issue is manpower.”
It was such an issue, Voulgaris told the group, that he had to prioritize. Given the shortage of officers, he didn’t want his cops making arrests for minor crimes that would take them off the streets. “I’m being totally frank and honest with you, and I hope you appreciate that,” he said, adding, “I’ll probably be fired tomorrow.”
The group responded with a nervous laugh. The shortage of patrol officers was no secret—according to an analysis by the Tribune, the city had 779 fewer beat cops in December 2013 than it did in the fall of 2011, a decline of 10 percent—but it was rare to hear a senior official be so specific about what sorts of problems that shortage was causing.
Officers say that in busy districts, it can take hours for anyone to show up in response to a 911 call. “It sucks, but it’s true,” says a patrol officer on t
he South Side. “There may be only one car freed up for the entire district that can answer jobs.”
According to a 2012 federal study, only 44 percent of violent crime victims (and 34 percent of property crime victims) report the incidents anyway. The longer victims wait for police to arrive, the greater the chance they will leave the scene. No victim, no report. “If people are waiting around for a squad car to show up because you don’t have enough manpower, your reported crime is going down,” a detective says.
The problem is especially acute in minority neighborhoods, says Harvey Grossman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. The ACLU has a pending case against the city, on behalf of a West Side community group, alleging that the city failed to deploy police equitably across communities. The case is currently in the discovery phase.
On top of that, if you call 911 these days, you may wind up getting shunted off to the city’s nonemergency 311 call center. As of February 3 last year—days after the headline-grabbing murder of teenager Hadiya Pendleton—citizens who call 911 to report garage burglaries, vehicle thefts, thefts, simple assaults, and similar crimes in which the suspect is no longer on the scene and no one is in danger are directed to 311. (Under Weis, only 911 calls about lost property and a few other minor issues were rerouted.) McCarthy called the change “the best use of our resources,” a move that would free up 44 officers a day and absorb 137,000 hours of case reporting that was once handled by patrol officers.
Sounds reasonable in theory. But cops say the pushing of calls to 311—the line Chicagoans use to, say, report potholes or rats in their alley—has worsened the underreporting of crime. That’s because the typical wait for someone to pick up a 311 call is much longer than for a 911 call, according to both victims and officers interviewed. And when a police officer does answer, the report is almost always taken by phone. Says one cop: “Victims get frustrated because they are talking to someone on the phone [instead of in person], and they just say, ‘To hell with this.’”
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