Read the story. You're wrong. When the police don't take reports when people are shot, robbed, etc. that is indeed novel. It's also criminal.
You misunderstand my point. I'm saying that, if true, this has probably been going on for some time, with the commisioner and/or incumbent mayor moving the numbers in their favor and/or the challenger accusing him of doing the same. It's very hard to get a good idea of what is going on when both parties have axes to grind and the facts themselves are in dispute. I'm not dismissing the impropriety of the suppression of crime data, if it occurred. However, having a politician lobbing bombs and producing a few (possibly isolated) cases does not prove, as is implied by the thread title, a conspiracy to under or over-report crimes.
Could this be happening? Sure, but it really makes me scratch my head and wonder why. The benefit to the mayor is obvious, but the benefit to the police department is less so.
Quid pro quo arrangements like "you keep the numbers down and good things will happen to your budget" could exist, but keeping them hush-hush is very problematic. If I were looking to tinker with the numbers, I'd try to do it well above the level of street cop and dispatch- that requires a lot of co-conspirators.
"Relating" runs is a must-do for the police. Failure to do this will result in artificially inflated numbers. The run in question (relating an agg assault to a robbery) is curious, but hardly impossible. Many, many times we get a shots-fired call, then a robbery call, and a long while later you have someone finally decide that the hole in his leg is not going to heal itself, so he calls 911. So, do you have 1 shots-fired, 1 robbery, and 1 shooting? Probably not- it's pne incident. You probably have one entry into NIBRS or UCR or whatever reporting method you're using,
provided you can link them all up logically. It sounds like they're saying the cops didn't do that in the run in question. However, you'd have to look at the report itself to see how it was (or wasn't) linked, and they are a weebit sketchy on the details.
Linking incidents, if done properly is
not suppression of crime statistics. Note the caveat- like anything else, you have to do it properly. For instance, if the robbery report actually makes no mention of the guy who was shot-at, that's an error (at the very least). However, you'd have to read the robbery report to see.
As to the rest, it is very common for the police to not take reports when the so-called victims are uncooperative. While this might seem like suppression of crime data (and it probably goes against dept. policy), it is often less cut and dried than one might think. If you show up and someone is injured, but no one wants help from the poh-leece, it is, at the very least, unclear what report you should take. Was it a robbery? Was it an assault? Domestic? What happened? Were weapons used? If so, what weapons? Is this guy the victim, or merely the loser out of a mutual assault? Not taking the report is probably no worse for statistics than taking the wrong one, even though most PDs have the policy of taking what limited info you have and filing the report with it.
In truth, reading over the incidents in that article, it sounds like the cops were being lazy more than anything else and the Dept. needs to re-iterate its report-taking policy to them.
Mike