I’ve been cringing ever since the story broke alleging that the NYPD is basically doing what they can to make their crime stats appear better than they are. Leonard Levitt makes some interesting points about it in his September 6th post on his blog (that link will always take you to the current post so you may have to scroll back to see the one from September 6th).

There is no doubt crime is down, but given the tremendous pressure to keep crime down and to keep it going down every year, and many other factors (some mentioned by Levitt) this mess was almost inevitable. I cringe because, well, I have a sense of what is probably going on behind the scenes.

It’s been a bad patch of crime news. A recent article in the New York Times about the FBI’s Civil Rights Cold Case initiative was filled with disheartening news.

(The picture by Erik Lesser is from the Times article.)

I wanted to post a link to an article by Kirk Mitchell in The Denver Post titled: Lured by cold cases, retired detectives go back on the beat. The picture below is from the article and the caption reads:

Once-retired Lakewood Police Department homicide Detective Alex Jameson stands next to files on 22 cold-case homicides. Familiar with many of the cases, Jameson works part time and enjoys being back on the job. (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post).

The article also includes a link to another article about some of Denver’s cold cases.

As of January 16, 2007 there were 9,082 unsolved murders in New York since 1985. To get an estimate of the current total I added up the murders from 2007 – 2009 (2007: 496, 2008: 523, 2009: 471) and then using the most optimistic clearance rates (67%) the current number of unsolved murders in New York since 1985 would be 9,574. (Nationally, 36.4% of all murders go unsolved as of the latest data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports).

I noticed an amazing fact while I was browsing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports—in 2008 there were more white murder victims than black. Figures for 2009 haven’t been released yet, but I believe this might be the first year where there were more white victims.

Success against homicide in Newark makes detectives’ demotions puzzling, by Joan Whitlow — Friday, June 4th, 2010, The Newark Star-Ledger.

“A statue of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan was unveiled at the Essex County court complex yesterday, a long overdue honor for the associate justice who was born and raised in Newark.”

“In recent weeks, that court complex has been the scene of events that should reassure residents about justice being served in Newark. Prosecutors and detectives stood before the cameras in April to announce arrests, finally, in the three-decade-old murders of five teenage boys. Last month, prosecutors won the first conviction in the 2007 Mount Vernon schoolyard murders.”

“Those are important successes in a jurisdiction where the forensic unit used to be a joke, where the local police and county prosecutors used to blame each other for the failure to make murder cases and where a poor conviction rate led the state Attorney General’s Office to take over the prosecutor’s office in 1991.”

“Many citizens had the understandable perception that the police couldn’t catch the murderers, and if they did, the prosecutors couldn’t put them away.”

“Certainly, the brave testimony of the surviving victim in the Mount Vernon shooting was a major factor in the conviction of the first defendant in that case. Witness Natasha Aeriel will have to keep her courage as the others accused of killing her brother and two of her friends come to trial.”

“There have been enough successes, however, to suggest that more justice is being done these days for homicide victims in Newark and Essex County. The most recent figures, from 2008, showed the homicide conviction rate in Essex County had risen above 80 percent, and the prosecutor’s office says it’s continued to improve.”

“That was what I wanted to write about last week. Then I found out that the Newark Police Department had suddenly reassigned three homicide detectives — who had worked those two previously mentioned big cases — to be patrol car officers …”

The rest of this piece is here. The photograph was taken by Ed Murray/The Star-Ledger.