CompStat Cover-Up Exposed

(NOTE: This ought to be read by every single exempt member of the Department, especially while leaving the CompStat meeting at 35th Street)

You would think with the Chicago media being as liberal as most media types are, they'd keep up on the whole left-leaning conglomeration of publications out there - the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Huffington Post, etc.

We'd imagine that the Village Voice out of New York City would be a daily read for most of them at some point during the week. But if it was, how could they possibly miss what could be the biggest police scandal in history, a scandal that should reach all the way to Chicago and the 5th floor at 35th and Michigan at this very moment? Part one broke yesterday:

• In 2010, The Village Voice produced a five-part series, the "NYPD Tapes," about a cop who secretly taped his fellow New York Police Department officers.

  For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly 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.

• The Voice has obtained that 95-page report, and it shows that the NYPD confirmed Schoolcraft's allegations. In other words, at the same time that police officials were attacking Schoolcraft's credibility, refusing to pay him, and serving him with administrative charges, the NYPD was sitting on a document that thoroughly vindicated his claims.

For those unfamiliar with the Schoolcraft case, three weeks after reporting the crime manipulations to his internal affairs department, Schoolcraft was forcibly removed from his apartment and committed to a psych ward for 6 days. He is currently suing the NYPD and the brass for $50 million-plus and the Village Voice just handed him a blank check along with the keys to a few dozen houses of NYPD exempts.

The second shoe involves the authors of the book "The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation" that we touted a few weeks ago. Two college professors, one of whom is a retired NYPD captain, pretty much destroy any crime-reduction properties of the CompStat model of policing and pin it solely on statistical manipulation and misreporting as recorded by Schoolcraft. Their book has just gotten a layer of impenetrable armor:

• Vindication! The newly exposed New York City Police Department's (NYPD) Quality Assurance Division Report indicating nearly all of our allegations are correct has been around since June 2010. Attacks against our research went on well into 2011 and continue until this day. How in good conscience NYPD could continue to attack Adrian Schoolcraft and our research is beyond shame; it is revolting. [emphasis SCC's]
  

  Without question Graham Rayman's explosive exposé of the NYPD's internal Quality Assurance Division Report on downgrading crime is a rarity. It represents the city's investigative reporting at its best. Our book The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation unveils the mainstream media's sustained failure to pursue the NYPD's proclivity to manipulate crime reports to make them appear favorable.

So looking at the local impact, we have an egomaniac from New York who was instrumental in applying a now thoroughly discredited "crime reduction tool" that is about to cost New York City tens of millions of dollars and has opened up police brass to potentially bankrupting personal damages.

For all the brains Rahm is supposed to have, his choice of McCompStat is looking like a real lemon. A questionable personal background, a rather shady disciplinary record, close association with a cabal of New York bosses who think nothing of jailing a whistleblower and lying to the citizens they're supposed to be protecting with a statistical program that seems to have been developed by Enron and Global Crossing.

Tie that into the recent "loss" of the G8 summit due to preparatory negligence on the part of the political actors running this operation and we wouldn't be out of line thinking that Rahm ought to pull that pre-signed, undated resignation letter for McGee8 and send him packing.