When the FBI released its 1998 crime report for major U.S. cities last month, the Philadelphia numbers confirmed the enormity of the city's past statistical falsification- the focus of a series of articles by The Inquirer over the previous year. Major crime dropped 7 percent in the rest of America, but it was up 11 percent in Philadelphia. In raw numbers, Philadelphia reported 2,603 more violent crimes and 9,211 more property crimes than in 1997.

The mayor and the police commissioner explained it was not a crime wave, just the result of better police reporting after The Inquirer had hammered away at the issue for the past year. It was more than just an issue of dry statistics. Inquirer reporters had interviewed dozens of victims who were shot; stabbed, seriously beaten, raped or robbed, but the police had declared in nearly every case that no crime had occurred.

Some victims were denied state-funded compensation because the police said no crimes had been committed. And suspects stayed on the streets.

For decades, Philadelphia police engaged in a massive public relations conspiracy to make the city appear safer than it really was. The Philadelphia District Attorney recently characterized the falsification of crime stats as the city's "dirty little secret."

Exposing the secret

The secret was exposed only after the city agreed to release zip drives with crime-by-crime data to The Inquirer and its sister paper, The Philadelphia Daily News. The database files provided a set of basic facts: dates, times, locations, crime-code classification, clearances information and more on 700,000 major and minor crimes from 1991 through 1997. Eventually, Tom Torok of the paper's computer-assisted reporting and analysis unit, put all that information on a fast Web site: http://home.phillynews.com/crime (See December 1998 Uplink).

While the police department had resisted releasing this data for several years, Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell finally ordered it made public. Inquirer reporters sorted the data using the Access database and Excel spreadsheet programs, allowing them to produce crime analysis for each of the city's 23 precincts.

Several precinct captains were able to help us find the flaws in the numbers for their individual districts. The captains had kept their own crime statistics for their precincts, and their numbers conflicted with the official figures. Pulling together the flaws in the precinct data, we were able to report that about 3,000 property crimes had apparently been deleted from the officials' count. The giveaway was a suspicious drop in car ripoffs that appeared in only one half of the year.

The police department, after initially contending that the precincts' captains were wrong, would eventually concede that 2,559 car thefts and 560 larcenies were never counted in 1997.

It was an enormous admission. The undercount in stolen cars alone exceeded the entire number of heisted vehicles reported for many cities in 1997. It was more, for example, than all the stolen cars reported for the year in Raleigh and Greensboro, combined population: 454,000). It exceeded the combined 1997 total for Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA (total population: 650,000). The department's admission of under-reporting gave us credibility with town watch groups and victims' advocates - and even some police officials. They would all be important in the next phase of the project.

Humanizing numbers

For our next round of stories, we wanted to put a human face on the numbers. We had to find victims whose crimes had been dumped. Among the steps we took was to compare court records for hundreds of cases with the crime-by-crime police data. We found that far more suspects were criminally charged with aggravated assault than police said they had ever arrested for the crime. The victims' advocates, rape counselors and town-watch groups gave us additional information about crimes they believed had never been properly reported by police.

We interviewed civilian crime-watch leaders who had kept their own personal records of crime in their neighborhoods. Politicians alerted us to victims who had complained of police inaction on crimes.

Some police also helped us. They understood that dishonesty in crime reporting was hurting them. Because Philadelphia was supposed to be one of the safest urban areas in America, the bogus crime stats at times had been used to justify cuts in police funding.

Helpful police showed us how to work the bureaucracy to obtain the original crime reports for incidents they knew had never made it to the official count. In getting this aid, we were able to exploit a kind of glasnost brought on by the arrival of a new reformist police commissioner, John F. Timoney, who had made accurate figures a cornerstone of his crime-fighting strategy.

Timoney gyrated between two extremes as our reporting unfolded. On the one hand, he was blunt in his own lack of trust in Philadelphia crime figures. On the other, he often fought our reporting efforts when we pushed to illustrate the overall trends with concrete pictures of victims and concrete examples of police negligence.

Back to documents

If an incident wasn't shown in the police data, we ordered the street cop's initial incident report. The city charges $15 for each copy of an incident report. We ordered hundreds.

When we located victims, they often told us tragic stories of uniformed arrogance.

Rapes, for example, sometimes had been coded as "investigate person" if investigators questioned the reliability of the victims. Incidents of shooting and stabbing were coded as "hospital case."

Even a murder case was affected by the downgrading. Melanie Alge, an 86-year-old widow, was critically beaten by a robber in May 1998. Police initially characterized the incident as a property crime, purse snatching. Two weeks after the beating Alge died. "Just because my sister was old is no reason to dismiss the incident as a mere purse snatch," Alge's sister would later write, demanding an investigation of police bungling.

No suspect has ever been arrested in the murder. On May 17, the day after the FBI released its report on crime in the largest American cities for 1998, the Inquirer published another crime story.

This time there was no zip drive. The police department had promised to give us new crime-by-crime data but did not complete the data before the story was published.

Still, we were able to show some apparent flaws in Philadelphia's newest numbers by simply comparing them to the reports of other major cities.

In the new numbers, Philadelphia police reported 8,701 aggravated assaults - a 40 percent increase over 1997. That still seemed low.

Even with the dramatic 40 percent jump, Philadelphia's figures were at serious variance with the number of aggravated assaults reported by other large U.S. cities.

Philadelphia was 22 percent below the average per-capita assault rate for the major U.S. cities in 1998.

Nine of the 10 major cities reported more aggravated assaults than robberies. Los Angeles, for one, reported twice as many assaults as holdups.

That makes sense, if you think about it. Surely, it is more likely to get beaten in a bar fight or other scuffle than to be held up.

Not in Philadelphia. It was the sole exception among the top 10 U.S. cities. The numbers said 11,435 people were robbed last year but only 8,701 assaulted.

University of Maryland criminologist Lawrence Sherman, named by the police commissioner to lead an audit of the department's reports, had previously said the ratio of aggravated assaults and robberies was important.

Sherman said a city's statistics probably were unreliable if the relationship between the two crimes was far out of step with the national norms.

And some officials never seemed to understand the impact of the chicanery. "This isn't about how fast police respond to 911 calls, or how they deal with civilians, or how they fight crime. It's a matter of numbers," the mayor's spokesman, Kevin Feeley, told reporters when the scandal was unfolding last year.

Mark Fazlollah can be reached by e-mail at fazlo.pia@phillynews.com