Even Formerly Respected Police Departments Assist in Weaving Morally Corrupt Falsity — Refusing to Take Crime Reports to Keep Crime Rates Lower than They Actually Are — another Example of Government-Employed Supervisors Intentionally Working against the Public Interest

© 2011 Peter Free

 

31 December 2011

 

 

The premises upon which this essay is based

 

Reality-accepting morality is ultimately the glue that holds society together.

 

Effective morality begins by recognizing provable truth.

 

 

The sad place where American culture is today in respect to both propositions

 

Ethical corruption has virtually consumed American society.  Deceit is everywhere, even within the professions explicitly bound to uphold it.

 

That’s where the following law enforcement example comes in.

 

 

“Why do your job, when it’s so much easier to collect money for doing nothing and telling lies?”

 

The New York Times exposed the City’s police department actively obscuring facts about crime rates:

 

Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork.

 

But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.

 

It is not unusual for detectives, who handle telephone calls from victims inquiring about the status of their cases, to learn that no paperwork exists.

 

Detective Louis A. Molina, president of the National Latino Officers Association, said that for some officers, the desire of supervisors to keep recorded crime levels low was “going to be on your mind,” and that it “can play a role in your decision making.”

 

“For police officers,” he added, “it’s gotten to the point of what’s the most diplomatic way to discourage a crime report from being taken.”

 

“Cops don’t want a bad reputation, and stigma,” one commander said. “They know they have to please the sergeants.” Like several other officers and supervisors, he spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

 

The sergeants, in turn, are acting on the wishes of higher-ups to keep crime statistics down, a desire that is usually communicated stealthily, the commander said.

 

© 2011 Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein, Police Tactic: Keeping Crime Reports Off the Books, New York Times (30 December 2011)

 

 

Examples

 

According to the New York Times investigation, police-originated non-reporting does not just occur regarding trivial matters:

 

(1) In one case, a woman reported being sexually groped twice by a passing bicyclist, yet her report was not taken.  The police officer’s rationale?  The victim didn’t know who the criminal was or where he worked.  Taking a report would be a waste of time.

 

The Department subsequently recorded the crimes, only after a city councilman intervened because he was concerned about the high number of sex gropings in his district.

 

(2) In another instance, a woman fled an intruder who had climbed through a window into her home.  No fingerprints were taken.  When she inquired as to why, she discovered that the responding officers had not even written a report.

 

(3) The almost certain victim of a pickpocketing could not get officers to classify her report as a crime because she had not been bumped or jostled.  (Neither of which characterizes a skillful pickpocket.)

 

The Department’s own guidelines on such incidents indicated that, “The victim does not need to have witnessed, felt or otherwise been aware of being bumped or jostled in order to properly record the occurrence as grand larceny.”

 

 

“So, what is NYPD really doing?”

 

Making itself look good, by preventing crime reports from recording actual crime levels.  The personal and departmental self-interest is obvious.

 

What is less obvious is the egregious dereliction of police mission that is involved.  Law enforcement exists to protect the public and to report accurate statistics on crime levels.  When criminal incidents are actively concealed, neither is possible.

 

For example, in the groping case, the unhelpful cop’s inaction prevents even his precinct colleague officers from knowing that there’s a pervert “out there.”  His precinct’s chain-of-command looks good, but the public suffers because the essential law enforcement mission has been abandoned in favor of intra-department self-interest.

 

“Surely, this is just NYPD, no?”

 

Probably not.  I have good reason to suspect that identical non-reporting is going on in the major city where I live.

 

As a former law enforcement supervisor, I know that, just as soon as one large department proves that it can get away with cooking the books, others follow.

 

Jurisdictions cannot politically afford to look as if they are failing, when their honestly reported crime rates appear to compare poorly with others that are dishonestly reported.

 

It becomes a nationwide race to the rotten barrel bottom.

 

If you doubt this, think about how police chiefs migrate from one department to another across the nation.  They have to compete, in quantitative terms, on a national level.

 

Consequently, ambitious law enforcement men and women will do what is necessary to make themselves look quantifiably good.  None of this needs to be explicit.  “Underlings” know what puts a smile on the boss’s face.  And they promptly feel the lash of his/her wrath.  As the Times article indicates, words need not be spoken.

 

This is how organizational moral corruption works.

 

 

 

If my initial premises are accurate, ignoring or concealing Truth is fundamentally immoral

 

Once Truth flees, we are all left aimlessly floating in Illusion’s eventually murderous bubble.

 

As time passes, Reality finally pricks this gaseous bag of accumulated deceits, and national culture falls too far to be rescued.

 

The United States is today on the threshold of becoming exactly the corruption-ridden, garbage heap society that its Founders arguably hoped to avoid.

 

 

The moral? — When we lose sight of basic ethics, we lose ourselves

 

That’s inarguable, according to each of the world’s major spiritual traditions.

 

Yet today, our society seems to delight in flouting this rule, as if there will be no consequences to pay.  Either now, tomorrow, or in the next life that so many of profess to believe in.

 

On a practical level, the existential problem with the incremental corruption of personal soul is that it is perennially camouflaged by the psyche’s Denial.

 

But in the case of governmental institutions and their missions, outsiders can see through self-seeking camouflage.  We have no excuse for tolerating Government’s bad behavior.