This report is very significant, and very jarring. A CBS affiliate in Chicago is claiming the city’s law enforcement agencies are manipulating crime statistics to make it look like the homicide rate is lower than it is. Crime File News has some thoughts here, including the fact Daley has used the statistics as support for Chicago’s handgun ban. John Lott weighs in here.
A little bit of background: Prior to the 1990s, police often took a don’t-blame-us-cuz-other-factors-control-crime approach to statistics. But Rudy Guiliani, with police chief William Bratton, used highly aggressive police and statistical techniques to bring crime under control. Their efforts saved countless lives with a 70 percent drop in crime.

The campaign was twofold. Law enforcement managers would grill local supervisors and officers about crime trends in their areas (tracked through the new CompStat program), with harsh reprimands for those who didn’t keep a good handle on their numbers. Then, the local squads would crack down on crime, interestingly focusing on “quality of life” issues (based on James Q. Wilson’s Broken Windows theory). For example, they’d go after subway turnstile jumpers — and often find people with outstanding arrest warrants.

With this success, other cities tried to replicate the trend. The LAPD picked up Bratton himself (seeing a 25 percent decrease in crime), Chicago follows the model and I’ve even heard Bratton-like rhetoric from cops in Green Bay, Wisconsin (my hometown). Chicago hasn’t been quite as successful as New York was. My suspicion is that the pressure to perform, coupled with an unwillingness to go as far as it takes, is hurting matters.

I attended college in the Chicago area, and a representative of the department gave a presentation to a class I took. A student asked about New York’s greater success, and the representative argued Chicago was trying to have a decrease in crime without going quite as far as New York had in aggressiveness.

There is a tradeoff to be made — civil liberties activists threw a fit over New York, for example. But, well, there is a tradeoff to be made. You can’t expect full results from less than full measures.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.