In today’s climate of cash for scores, schools and police departments are under intense pressure to raise test scores and lower crime rates to obtain state and federal money, among other reasons.  While the scoring of students, schools and teachers is performed by a complicated formula of metrics involving the measurement of student growth, value-added models and teacher effectiveness (see Pearson Bulletin, April, 2011, Issue 19), the measurement of crime statistics is likewise an intricate task.  The end results of these scores and measurements, however, generally reflect a skewed perception of reality, and sometimes for surprising purposes.

There is currently much debate about using value-added models to evaluate teachers.  Many education “experts” espouse this method as being the best and most effective way to weed out “bad” teachers.  There are, however, many variables to consider.  Like all theories in process, the research is extensive, but has yet to be proven conclusive.  An excellent article in the Washington Post, Leading mathematician debunks “value-added,” lists a myriad of arguments against using this model to evaluate teachers.

The mind-boggling problems associated with national standardized testing, and how scores can be misused when evaluating teacher performance, is a topic unto itself.  Some experts believe that the method of evaluating teachers based on student performance relies “on a flawed statistical approach,” according to an August 21, 2010 Wall Street Journal column, Needs Improvement: Where Teacher Report Cards Fall Short.

Enter the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded “a study in seven school districts of teacher evaluation, combining test score-based analysis with other factors, such as teacher tests of subject knowledge and independent ratings of in-class video recordings.”

That sounds well and good, until you dig a bit deeper to discover that The Gates Foundation also funded the Pearson Foundation “to create a national K-12 curriculum. Gates ponied up $3 million to have Pearson develop 24 courses, 11 in math and 13 in English-Language Arts,” according to an article in Teaching Community.

This partnership simply smacks of crony capitalism at its worst.  The article noted:

Others were concerned by the implications of Gates and Pearson Foundations working together. After all, was the Pearson Foundation simply developing curriculum, on Gates’ dime, that the parent company, Pearson, would then turn around and sell? After all, who better to “align” with a common curriculum than the company perceived to develop the curriculum itself? Isn’t it logical that Pearson’s textbooks and PD and turnaround services and testing would then get the seal of approval from the Gates/Pearson Foundation partnership?

While the head of the Pearson Foundation told EdWeek “no firm exclusivity agreement” was in place with Pearson, it hardly takes a Ph.D. to realize that Pearson, and not McGraw-Hill or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would have the inside track to the Pearson Foundation’s new course sequence.

Criticism of this curriculum partnership comes from both sides of the political aisle, as it raises concerns about data-mining, nationalizing education and unconstitutionally removing control of local schools from local districts.  “After all, it has everything we need. Ideology. Dollars. For-profits. Big brother. Local control. Good data. Squishy data. And a soapbox that virtually anyone can stand on.”

Speaking of “squishy data,” police departments also rely on a similar “value-added” metric system when reporting crime statistics, albeit for several different reasons.  One model available to law enforcement agencies is the Poisson-Based Regression Analysis of Aggregate Crime Rates., which “introduces a statistical approach to analyzing aggregate crime rates that solves problems arising from small populations and low base-rates.”

The research suggests that when the population of a municipality is small, the number of crimes committed is not representative of the overall crime rate as compared to “populations of several hundred thousand.”   The theory posits that “even a single arrest for rape or homicide might correspond to a high crime rate,” and that there are necessarily “larger errors of prediction for per capita crime rates based on large populations.”  The regression model is based on multiple factors (including complex mathematical formulas involving logarithms, negative bionomials and gamma distributions), but then takes into account almost the same “value-added” metrics used in education, such as “(1) residential instability, defined as the proportion of households occupied by persons who had moved from another dwelling in the previous 5 years; (2) ethnic heterogeneity, computed as the index of diversity (Warner and Pierce, 1993), based on the proportion of households occupied by white versus nonwhite persons; (3) family disruption, indexed by female-headed households, expressed as a proportion of all households with children; (4) poverty, defined as the proportion of persons living below the poverty level; (5) the unemployment rate (coded as proportion of the workforce); (6) proximity to metropolitan counties, as indicated by a dummy variable with 1 being adjacent to a metropolitan statistical area and 0 being nonadjacent.”

While school administrators incorporate (and, yes, manipulate) these “value-added” metrics in order to raise their scores, police departments can employ those same data variables in order to “prove” that crime rates have decreased.

They could also under-report or even “reassign” (read: “downgrade”) certain crimes for the purpose of not having to report them to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.  (Note:  An excellent resource on the UCR, crime factors, method of data collection, and other information, is the North Carolina Department of Justice website.)

A PoliceOne.com article dated June 20, 2012, Fudge factor: Cooking the books on crime stats, explains that CompStat is a tool implemented by the New York Police Department in the 1990s, and was “intended to map crime and identify problems” in order to help police departments to reduce crime.  Unfortunately, this tool also has the potential for abuse when law enforcement agencies can use it to manipulate data “to make it falsely appear that crime rates have been reduced.”  There are a multitude of reasons why this is done, which include impressing elected officials, fast tracking career advancement, and creating “PR-friendly statistics about lowering crime and increasing arrests,” among other justifications.

The PoliceOne article described:

In a newsletter to union members calling for them to share evidence of stat fudging, [NYPD Union Recording Secretary] Robert Zink listed some of the simpler ways to fudge.

• Don’t file reports
• Misclassify crimes from felonies to misdemeanors
• Undervalue the property lost to crime so it’s not a felony
• Report a series of crimes as a single event

An admittedly-insidious recipe for fudging the numbers is to make it hard (or impossible) for people to report crimes. Specific recipes include:

• Logging rapes as “inconclusive incidents”
• Attempted murder in a drive-by gang shooting where the victim is missed might be reclassified as “criminal mischief”
• LAPD reported a 28 percent drop in violent crime the same year it downgraded DV assaults in which the victim suffered minor or no injuries – this reduced the FBI’s NIBRS counts which don’t include a non-serious city charge
• Reclassifying burglaries as less serious thefts.

While fudging the statistics serves to boost the careers of “chiefs, sheriffs, and politicians,” according to this article, the real losers are the public and any law enforcement officers who complain about the dishonesty.  If you think blowing the whistle is easy, think again.  Consider the plight of this cop:

“NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft claims he was forcibly taken from his home and involuntarily put in a mental hospital where he spent six days — in retaliation for complaining his supervisors were cooking the books to make the crime rate seem lower. A 95-page internal report produced seven months later founded some of Schoolcraft’s fears. Schoolcraft also released secret audiotapes in which he recorded precinct brass urging cops to cook the books. He remains suspended without pay.”

In Chicago last year, a 20 year old woman was found murdered, yet her death went unreported as a homicide.  In The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates, Chicago Magazine reported:

On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a homicide by “unspecified means.” This rare ruling means yes, somebody had killed Groves, but the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of death.

Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death investigation. In his writeup, he cited the medical examiner’s “inability to determine a cause of death.”

Chicago Magazine investigated the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics and “identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.”  The magazine’s investigators also found dozens of other serious crimes that were downgraded to less serious offenses, “or made to vanish altogether.”  Sources inside the police department required anonymity when relating their experiences.  Obviously, they had good reason.  However, what they revealed was disturbing.

Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the “magic ink”: the power to make a case disappear.

Just like their counterparts in New York City, the only winners in the Chicago Police Department are the top brass.  Real crime rates are off the charts.  “Meanwhile, the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil pols on Chicago’s City Council have mostly accepted the police department’s crime numbers at face value. So have most in the media.”

A June 19, 2012 Mother Jones article, Just Like in “The Wire,” Real FBI Crime Stats Are “Juked,” echoes the sentiments found in countless other resources.  FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer emailed a statement to the magazine stating that the agency “relies on the integrity of reporting agencies to report crime in accordance with FBI UCR policies.  Given the fact participation in UCR is on a voluntary basis, no sanction can be applied for noncompliance.”

That’s hardly a comforting thought for a general public concerned about crime in their areas.  In addition, the purposeful reclassification, under-reporting and outright downgrading of crimes can, and obviously does, erode the morale of a police department, as well the public’s confidence in their local law enforcement agency.

The Mother Jones article further dishearteningly noted:

While underreporting crime may score police chiefs and mayors short-term political points, it can also prevent police officers from effectively fighting crime in the areas that need them the most, according to Eterno. Departments that mismanage the numbers may miss crucial crime patterns, lose out on opportunities to acquire extra officers and patrols, and complicate social research studies. UCRs are also used as a variable in calculating federal and state funding, so if they are flawed, resources don’t get allocated as efficiently.

Just how well is all this “value-added” metric system working out for teachers and law enforcement agencies?

According to one Florida teacher’s experience, not so well.

In a column posted last month in FlaglerLive.com, A Matanzas High Teacher Reveals Her Evaluation Scores, and the Absurdity of Florida’s “VAM” Scam, Jo Ann Nahirny exposes the outrageously flawed data, not to mention the utter uselessness, of the methodology used to allegedly evaluate her performance.  Nahimy wrote:

So this VAM score –which comprised half of my total teacher evaluation score that year– was based on the performance of a mere 20 percent of the students I taught. Oh, and by the way, I actually did teach about 50 or so 10^th graders that year, not just 35. But the FCAT Reading scores of 15 (or 30 percent) of them weren’t even included in calculating my VAM score, simply because they were new to our district that year.  So though they occupied desks in my classroom, and though I graded their essays, tests and quizzes, answered their questions, attended their parent conferences and determined whether they passed or failed English, each one of those 15 ended up as a persona non grata, or figuratively speaking, nonexistent, at least with regard to how much they were “worth” in terms of that meaningless number the Times Union’s been drooling to ensnare, my coveted VAM score.

Likewise, the manipulation of crime statistic data for the purpose of projecting the image of “lower” crime rates is just as misleading.  Regardless of all the various and sundry variables used to produce the data, be it population size, racial demographics, unemployment rates and the like, in the final analysis a crime is a crime is a crime.

Any way you try to manipulate the reports, a rape is still a rape, an armed robbery is still an armed robbery, and a murder is still a murder.

And yet, as we’ve seen by just the few examples cited above, it’s obviously an all too common practice for police department officials to do whatever they can to create a false sense of security by keeping the public and elected officials in the dark about actual crime rates.

The job security of a police chief depends on how much he can convince city officials that he’s doing a great job.  If he can keep crime rates artificially low, no one will be the wiser.  With the just the right amount of manipulation, almost anything can be proven, or refuted, by fudging the stats.

This type of dishonesty is just another form of corruption.

Police chiefs who encourage – or worse, order – their officers to reclassify and downgrade crimes, are a special kind of corrupt.

So, the next time you hear school board officials or police chiefs tell you that grades are up or crimes are down, take it with a grain of salt.

A good rule of thumb is, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.”

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”