Everything I Need To Know About The Effect of Metrics on Police Behavior I Learned from The Wire
Scathing report on how NY police gamed the process to improve their reported crime numbers. Nothing in this should be the least surprising to anyone who watched a few seasons of The Wire.
These are not just accounting shenanigans. There were actions the directly affected the public and individual liberty. People were rounded up on the street on BS charges to pad arrest stats while real, substantial crimes went ignored in a bid to keep them out of the reported stats.
There is one part in here that is a good illustration of public vs. private power. People who fear corporations seem to have infinite trust for state institutions. But the worst a corporation was ever able to do to a whistle blower was fire him. This is what the state does:
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraftsecretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.
Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
