“If they have burglaries that are open cases that are not solved yet, if you see anybody black walking through our streets and they have somewhat of a record, arrest them so we can pin them for all the burglaries,” Officer Anthony De La Torre said as part the probe. “They were basically doing this to have a 100 percent clearance rate for the city.”
Four officers — a third of the tiny, 12-man force — admitted to an outside investigator that they felt pressured to file inaccurate charges."
The charges need to be investigated and if found to have merit, then prosecuted in a court of law. No one is above the law and it should be applied to everyone equally and if anything, a chief of police should be held to the highest of standards.
If determined to be true then prosecute all involved to the fullest extent of the law.
That said I’m sorta dubious. There are far easier and more common ways to manipulate crime stats. Only felonies and a very select few misdemeanor crimes actually go into crime stat reporting. One of the most common ways departments nationwide manipulate stats depending on their agenda is reclassifying crimes down to a misdemeanor to avoid reporting in the stats or vice versa if they are trying to show a crime problem to justify a budget increase request.
So you reclassify a burglary as a petit theft. If you have a crime spree where it appears one person broke into four house or ten cars you classify it as one crime with multiple victims so its only counted once on the crime stats because of how they count. Or if you need more crime you classify each crime as its own separate crime. Etc, etc.
Its easy to do and many departments have been caught doing it. Most famously is the NYPD who were caught doing this just last decade to try and show that the police commissioners policies were dropping crime.
“If they have burglaries that are open cases that are not solved yet, if you see anybody black walking through our streets and they have somewhat of a record, arrest them so we can pin them for all the burglaries,” Officer Anthony De La Torre said as part the probe. “They were basically doing this to have a 100 percent clearance rate for the city.”
I read it but how often any job do people make up complete BS against bosses or co-workers to settle grievances and such. As I said absolutely this needs investigated and if found true it should be fully prosecuted. I’m just dubious because like I said there are far easier and less likely to be caught ways to manipulate stats as I described and even when you do get caught you just shrug and say that crime stat reporting is a complicated thing.
There is a fairly long history of some police departments pinning things on vagrants and the poor, many times whites. Some towns don’t have any black people to pin it on.
