{
  "id": "1998-december-we-dont-file-out-tapes",
  "slug": "1998-december-we-dont-file-out-tapes",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-december-we-dont-file-out-tapes.html",
  "year": 1998,
  "month": "December",
  "monthNum": 12,
  "headline": "\"WE DON'T FILE OUT TAPES\"",
  "kicker": "",
  "author_name": "Bob Warner",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "Philadelphia Daily News",
  "summary": "Police departments in major U.S. cities have resisted releasing electronic crime data to news organizations despite publicizing crime reductions, with Philadelphia's Daily News eventually obtaining records after a two-year battle involving the mayor's intervention.",
  "keywords": [
    "transparency",
    "police",
    "data"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Crime & Justice",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases"
  ],
  "technologies": [],
  "full_text": "Police departments around the country have been happy to take public bows for declining crime rates. But in many cases, they're still refusing to provide news organizations with electronic data that would allow closer scrutiny of their records.\n\nAs of early 1998, police departments in the nation's three biggest cities — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — were unwilling to release any data to reporters describing individual crimes. Houston's police department said it would be willing to release electronic data, but as of last January nobody had asked. Of the five biggest cities, only the Philadelphia police were providing the media with electronic data on local crime — and only after a two-year fight requiring intervention by a progressive mayor.\n\nThe Philadelphia Daily News began asking the police department for various pieces of electronic data - drug arrests, stolen cars, etc. - in 1994. With the exception of a small database describing city homicides, our requests were turned down, flatly and repeatedly, by the department's chief counsel and its day-to-day spokeswoman. In early 1996, we began asking for more comprehensive data - the past five years of criminal offenses reported to police, known to a small group inside the department as the \"offense tapes.\" Once again, we were turned down. \"We don't give out tapes,\" the department's spokeswoman told us.\n\nPennsylvania's public records law offered us little support. Written in 1957, it does not mention computers or electronic data. It contains a troublesome exemption for any records disclosing the institution or progress of a criminal investigation. Since the police claimed to investigate all Part 1 crimes reported to it, its lawyers would occasionally argue that this exemption covered any records on crimes reported to police.\n\nMedia allies\n\nBut we had an ally in the city's mayor, Ed Rendell, whose top aides had the common sense to manage the news media by providing information, not withholding it. Unofficially, they had long since agreed to the principle that documents considered public records on paper should also be considered public records when they're kept in an electronic format. We asked the mayor's office to review our dispute with the police.\n\nIt was a ticklish matter for the mayor's office, which had repeatedly been accused by the police officers' union of trying to run the department from the second floor of City Hall. But some sort of message was actually delivered to Police Commissioner Richard Neal, telling him he'd have to give us some data or provide reasonable explanations for withholding them.\n\nCalled and cornered\n\nWe still had trouble getting Neal to return our calls. Finally, we cornered him as he was kicking off a pedestrian safety campaign. That led to a series of three meetings, going through the department's record layouts and negotiating precisely what data would be turned over. The newspaper agreed to live without victim's names and addresses, but the department agreed to identify the blocks or intersections where crimes had occurred.\n\nThe agreement nearly fell apart with Neal's next phone call. Our data was ready, he said, but the Daily News would have to pay $2,089 - in advance - to cover the department's programming costs. Reluctantly, we agreed.\n\nIt didn't take long to find evidence of the department's bogus crime-counting practices: thousands of crimes from 1995 had been included in the data used to come up with 1996 crime totals for the FBI. It soon became clear that the department's annual crime counts were based on when they fed data into their computer system rather than when the crimes occurred.\n\nOur stories forced the department to withdraw crime figures previously submitted to the FBI for 1996 and 1997. More importantly, they became Exhibit A in a hot public debate over the effectiveness of the police department and the competence of Commissioner Neal. Five months later, Neal submitted his resignation. His successor, John Timoney, made clear on taking office that reform of the department's criminal data system would be one of his top priorities. Timoney has followed through.\n\nBob Warner can be reached at (215) 854-5885.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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      "slug": "1997-march-crime-connections",
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-december-we-dont-file-out-tapes.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-december-we-dont-file-out-tapes.json"
}