Oh, it's on.
Below is the Chicago Police Department's response to the newly published part one of Chicago Magazine's investigative report, "The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. Here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers" by David Bernstein and Noah Isackson.
John Kass takes up one of the cases cited in the Chicago Magazine report the police response -- the death of Tiara Groves -- in his Thursday column. He quotes Chicago Magazine standing by its story.
The issue is related to the subject of Inspector General: Chicago police underreported aggravated assaults, batteries in 2012, our recent story on the city Inspector General's new report on crime stats.
False, misleading and unsubstantiated Reporting in Chicago Magazine, April 8, 2014
For the third year in a row Chicago Magazine has published a lengthy article attacking the Chicago Police Department with a series of false claims, inaccurate suggestions, misleading information and unsubstantiated allegations.
The article published in the magazine on April 7, which apparently is the first of a two-part series that will continue in May, is false. The overall premise is not only absurd, when you look at the “facts” included in the story there are major factual errors.
Following is a point-by-point response to the glaring falsehoods – including a factual recap of each case cited by Chicago Magazine (since the reporters got a number of facts wrong, jumped to inaccurate conclusions in the cases, and did not include pieces of information that help accurately tell the whole story of the incident).
To summarize, the reporters make an unsourced, unsubstantiated, inaccurate statement that Supt. McCarthy was feeling pressure (from whom or what the reporters do not say) not only to “beat” the 2012 murder total, but also the 2011 murder total. The false allegation is asinine (the only murder “goal” is 0), and yet it is the basis for the entire argument they outline in the article. In order to prove this false hypothesis, the Chicago Magazine reporters offer inaccurate or misleading “facts” about a series of cases, crime data, CPD strategies and purported intimate conversations that never happened.
THE CASES
Chicago Magazine makes false allegations against CPD about six specific cases (involving seven victims) – getting the facts wrong and using those inaccuracies to bolster their false claims. It is unclear what information they base this reporting on, because at no time did the reporters FOIA or inquire about the status of any information on these cases. As a result, the conclusions they jump to are erroneous.
THE DATA
In several places, the reporters use inaccurate crime data to support their claims (again, they failed to ask CPD for or about the data they cite). The correct data is available to the public via the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Later, they falsely suggest Supt. McCarthy changed a component of CPD’s Uniform Crime Reporting – a component that has been unchanged for more than 30 years.
They also use inaccurate data regarding the number of officers on CPD’s payroll, again without ever having asked for, or FOIA’d, such information. The correct information, included in the below has routinely been shared with inquiring members of the media.
THE STRATEGIES
The reporters also falsely represent specifics about widely reported crime and deployment strategies – some of which could have been disputed through a simple Google search, or just asking the Department.
In addition to the lengthy counterpoint that follows, several key issues can be found with the story as a whole:
The reporters continually cite 10 cases they falsely allege CPD misclassified, yet they only outline six (involving seven victims).
Despite making wild accusations about the six cases, Chicago Magazine never inquired about the status or the findings of any of the cases they feature – through News Affairs or through the FOIA office. Therefore it is highly unlikely that the magazine reviewed the complete files.
The reporters contradict themselves in several key sections (see “DOUBLE SPEAK” examples).
Anonymous postings on the cop blog (not a reputable source of information) are among the more quoted sources in the article – in fact the blog is quoted more often than the Police Department.
There are numerous unnamed sources that are apparently no longer with the department. Why could they not be named if they’re no longer here?
This article is littered with opinion and editorializing by the reporters.
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FALSE: “Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves's death as a murder.”
Chicago Magazine fails – likely on purpose – to mention that witnesses told Detectives that victim Groves was experiencing medical distress earlier in the day.
We continue to believe the case is suspicious, but do not have enough information to prove that her death was a murder and to classify it as such.
This remains an active investigation, with action being taken on the case as recently as late March (before the Chicago Magazine story came out or that we were aware they were looking at this case).
DOUBLE SPEAK: “Given the (pathologist’s) finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves's death as a murder.” … “The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook expressly states that a police department's classification of a homicide should be based solely on a police investigation, not on the determination of a medical examiner or prosecutor's office.”
The authors make the claim that CPD should have classified victim Groves’ case as a murder based on the Medical Examiner’s finding, and then later say CPD should never do such a thing.
A Medical Examiner’s finding is a scientific finding and a widely recognized piece of evidence used by police departments across the country to investigate and classify cases. Not only is it acceptable to use such scientific information in classifying a case, doing anything to the contrary would be illogical.
UNSUBSTANTIATED, FALSE ALLEGATION: “We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.”
Chicago Magazine’s own story only takes issue with six cases (seven victims) – and they’re wrong on the facts in each case.
4. FALSE: "Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the "magic ink": the power to make a case disappear. Says another: "The rank and file don't agree with what's going on. The powers that be are making the changes."
This suggestion is ridiculous, and completely false. Further, case reports cannot be deleted.
We can, and do, track every case report, every update, even every time it's accessed. That information can be reviewed by employee name, by employee number, when the case was accessed, etc.
Further, accessing files in murder investigations for anything other than official police business is against the law.
FALSE: “Take "index crimes": the eight violent and property crimes that virtually all U.S. cities supply to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its Uniform Crime Report. According to police figures, the number of these crimes plunged by 56 percent citywide from 2010 to 2013—an average of nearly 19 percent per year—a reduction that borders on the miraculous.”
It is unclear what statistics Chicago Magazine is referencing (they never asked CPD to produce such data), but the figures submitted to the state Uniform Crime Report show a 20 percent decrease in index crimes from 2010 through 2013 (150,338 total violent + property reported in 2010, compared to 120,312 in 2013).
FALSE: "This dramatic crime reduction has been happening even as the department has been bleeding officers. (A recent Tribune analysis listed 7,078 beat cops on the streets, 10 percent fewer than in 2011.)"
CPD currently has more police officers on its payroll today than it did at the end of 2011:
January 1, 2014: 9,718 Police Officers
December 1, 2011: 9,496 Police Officers
There are virtually no vacancies among police officers and Police are keeping up with attrition. As police officer vacancies open up, through retirement or promotion, CPD enters a new class into the PoliceAcademy. CPD graduated 742 recruits from the Academy in 2013, which is the most in recent memory and far surpasses the Mayor’s pledge of graduating 600 new officers in 2013.
Chicago Magazine references a Tribune Article, which analyzed district assignments, as the source of this information. An analysis of the number of officers assigned to a district does not even represent the number of officers working the street in that district. District assignment data does not include the following officers assigned to work the street in the Bureau of Patrol: regular-time officers assigned to Impact Zones, officers working in districts as part of their field training, Area Saturation Teams, and Gun Teams. It also does not include officers working on the street in other Bureaus such as Organized Crime’s Gang Teams.
MISLEADING: “Chicago has learned that his (Inspector General Joe Ferguson) office has questioned the accuracy of the police department's crime statistics.”
Throwing this issue into the story obviously makes it seem like the factual issue raised by the IG and the conspiracy theory presented by Chicago Magazine are somehow related. They are, of course, not.
In 2010, during a previous administration, Illinois UCR clarified that police departments should track aggravated assaults and aggravated batteries by victim and not incident. At the time of the 2010 clarification, CPD did not change the city’s tracking of these crimes to reflect the clarified I-UCR definition. This issue was brought to this administration’s attention during the course of the OIG audit, and CPD immediately launched an in-depth review of every single aggravated assault and aggravated battery that occurred during 2012 and 2013, to correct the tracking of these crimes and bring the city into stricter adherence with reporting standards. This in-depth review is ongoing, and where errors in victim-level reporting exist, they will be corrected.
Under Mayor Emanuel and Superintendent McCarthy, CPD takes the tracking, compiling and reporting of crime data extremely seriously as that information informs our policing strategies and our deployment, and is shared with the public to provide an accurate understanding of crime conditions. We make extensive amounts of crime data available to the public online in a number of formats – which can be broken down citywide, by police district, by neighborhood, and even by small areas around a specific address. We are proud that CPD is regarded as the national leader for public transparency in crime data. We appreciate that the Office of the Inspector General affirmed CPD’s CompStat system and crime data.
UNSUBSTANTIATED, FALSE ALLEGATION: “Behind closed doors, according to a City Hall insider, Emanuel told his police chief that the department had better not allow a repeat performance of 2012 or McCarthy's days in Chicago would be numbered.”
The Mayor never threatened the Superintendent’s job.
What Chicago Magazine source would have been in the room for that conversation, or had knowledge of a purported intimate conversation that never existed? No one, obviously.
UNSUBSTANTIATED, FALSE ALLEGATION: “The chief felt even more pressure than his rank and file may have realized. For the former New Yorker to prove that his policing strategies worked in Chicago, he would need to keep the number of murders not just below 2012's total but also below 2011's: 435.”
This absurd allegation comes with no backup, not even a source confirms it for Chicago Magazine. This is nothing more than the reporters’ own speculation – and it’s wrong.
This implication that there was pressure to have fewer murders than in 2011, for reasons other than saving people’s lives, is unsubstantiated by Chicago Magazine, and yet it is the premise of the article and the basis for all of its allegations.
MISLEADING: “To do so, McCarthy leaned even more heavily on a tool that has proved wildly successful in his hometown: CompStat. Borrowing performance-management principles from the business world, CompStat collects, analyzes, and maps a city's crime data in real time. These statistics help police track trouble spots more accurately and pinpoint where officers are needed most. The department's number crunchers can slice and dice the stats all sorts of ways, spitting out reports showing percentage changes in various crimes by neighborhood over different time frames, for example: month to month, week to week—heck, hour to hour. Armed with those statistics, the police brass turn up the pressure in weekly meetings, grilling field commanders about crime in their areas… If the numbers are bad, the district commanders and officers get reamed out by McCarthy and the other bosses at headquarters.”
We appreciate that Chicago Magazine acknowledges the “wildly successful CompStat,” but doing so actually contradicts their claims that the gains made employing this system are “miraculous.”
This is called accountability.
Unlike a business, the metrics we measure are life and death. How many people were robbed at gunpoint between the hours of 8pm and midnight in your district and what are you doing about it (tactics, deployment, etc.) is a wholly appropriate question to be asking those charged with public safety in that community.
The CompStat system and crime data – which was affirmed as accurate by a recent Inspector General audit (also conveniently left out of the story) – helps us know if our strategies and deployment efforts are working. If they are not working, we can and do make adjustments in the interest of public safety.
MISLEADING AND FALSE: “And then there was 20-something Tiffany Jones from the South Side. (To protect the identity of her family, we have given her a pseudonym.) In January, Jones got into an argument with a male relative that turned into a "serious physical fight," according to the police report. Her sister later told police that she saw the enraged man punch Jones in the head. Police and paramedics arrived to find Jones's siblings struggling to keep him out of the family's apartment. Inside, Jones was sitting on the couch, gasping for breath. When officers asked her if she wanted to press battery charges, she could only nod yes, the police report shows. She tried to stand but collapsed to the floor, no longer breathing. Rushed to the hospital, Jones was soon pronounced dead. The attending doctor noted head trauma and bleeding behind Jones's left eye. Seeing fresh bruises on her left cheek, left eye, and both arms, the investigating officers were leaning toward recommending a first-degree murder charge against the male relative, according to the police report. First-degree murder—willfully killing or committing an act that creates a "strong probability of death or great bodily harm"—carries more severe penalties than any other homicide charge. The next day, however, a pathologist with the Cook County medical examiner's office came to the surprising conclusion that Jones had died from a blood clot that was unrelated to the fight. "Because of the embolism," the pathologist noted to detectives, according to the police report, Jones "would have died 'from just walking down the street.'" Disagreements between police and medical examiners are rare but not unheard of. When they do occur, the rule for police is clear. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook expressly states that a police department's classification of a homicide should be based solely on a police investigation, not on the determination of a medical examiner or prosecutor's office.”
A Medical Examiner’s ruling is a scientific finding, and such information is rightfully part of any police investigation.
In this case, the Medical Examiner scientifically stated that the victim did not die as a result of the battery. She had a pre-existing Pulmonary Thermo Embolism that the Medical Examiner ruled was the cause of death.
Contrary to what the article states, the victim’s sister never told the police she "witnessed" the victim being punched in the head. In fact, quite the opposite. She told the detectives that she did not witness the incident.
Based on the ME’s scientific finding, Detectives could not rule the case a murder.
Moreover, under state law someone cannot be prosecuted for a battery if the victim is deceased. That is not CPD policy.
FALSE: "The policing changes they had made in the past three months had worked! Those changes included, a day after Pendleton's death, moving 200 officers from desks to the streets and bringing back roving units Emanuel and McCarthy had disbanded when they first took over."
The Mobile Strike Force and Targeted Response Unit, disbanded in 2011 during CPD's return to community policing, were not recreated - nor is there some equivalent.
DOUBLE SPEAK: "Look at murder rates - homicides per 100,000 people - and you get 15 today. The rate is one-third higher than in 1960." … “Chicago would end the year with 507 recorded murders, more than in any other city in the nation.”
Once again, the reporters bounce back and forth – using whatever data set best makes their false argument. In this case, they insist that the raw number of murders is the most important figure and not the murder rate, which controls for population.
By that tally, Chicago had a higher number of murders than any other city. What the reporters fail to mention is that during the same time period Chicago’s murder rate was ranked 21st among major cities (FBI stats, see below).
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2013/07/chicagocrime.html
Later in the article, the reporters insist that murder rate is the best data point to use - conveniently failing to mention that in 2013 Chicago had the lowest murder rate since 1966.
FALSE AND MISLEADING: “Turns out the low March homicide numbers were made possible in part by curious categorizations of two more deaths. One is the case of Maurice Harris. On March 15, the 57-year-old Harris—an older man playing a young man's game—teamed up with a crew selling heroin near the corner of Cicero and Van Buren on the West Side. It was a sliver of turf that belonged to a street gang, the Undertaker Vice Lords. Midmorning, Harris saw about five men walking up the block. His crew scattered. Harris got a tap on the shoulder, then a punch in the face, according to the police report. Moments later, he was on the sidewalk, taking repeated punches and kicks and blows to the head with a metal pipe. When the beatdown finally ended, Harris told a witness that he couldn't feel his legs. He was rushed to Loretto Hospital, then transferred to two other hospitals—Mount Sinai and Rush—as his condition worsened. On March 19, Harris began slurring his words, and his arms went numb. Doctors put in a breathing tube; they also diagnosed a spinal cord injury. On March 21, six days after the beating, Harris died. Police recorded the Maurice Harris case as a battery, which is indisputably true. But not as a homicide. At first, the Cook County medical examiner's office said that an autopsy was inconclusive. The pathologist, according to the police report, "deferred the cause and manner of death pending further studies." Eight months later, on November 13, the same pathologist made a final ruling—a head scratcher to every police source we spoke to who reviewed the case. Harris, the doctor determined, died from a pulmonary embolism, diabetes, and drug abuse. The police report summarized the pathologist's findings: "The victim showed no significant evidence of injuries sustained from the battery [and] that in no way did it appear that the battery contributed to the cause of his death and therefore ruled his death as natural."
A Medical Examiner’s ruling is a scientific finding, and such information is rightfully part of any police investigation.
In this case, the Medical Examiner scientifically stated that the victim did not die as a result of the battery. The Medical Examiner rule the victim had a stroke and complications from a pre-existing Pulmonary Thermo Embolism, diabetes and drug abuse.
Based on this scientific finding, Detectives could not rule the case a murder.
LACK OF UNDERSTANDING BY REPORTERS: “That's all detectives needed to close their death investigation (of victim Maurice Harris). But they still had to wrap up the battery case. They declared it solved, reporting that they knew what had happened, knew who beat up Harris, and had enough evidence to "support an arrest, charge, and [turn] over to the court for prosecution." But because the victim was dead and "there is no complaining witness to aid in the prosecution," there was no reason to move forward. Harris's attackers were therefore never apprehended.
Under state law someone cannot be prosecuted for a battery if the victim is deceased. That is not CPD policy.
UNSUBSTANTIATED, FALSE ALLEGATION: "Might changes under Cina help explain the perplexing findings in other 2013 cases, such as those of Maurice Harris and Tiffany Jones? There is no evidence that the medical examiner's office intentionally issued misleading or inaccurate rulings to help the city keep its homicide count down. "I've never felt pressure one way or another to make my ruling," Cina says. "I'm pro–scientific truth more than anything." But knowledgeable sources who reviewed these cases for Chicago say that the way the medical examiner's rulings were worded gave police the wiggle room they needed to avoid "taking a hit" on the statistics, as one detective put it. Says a source who used to work at the medical examiner's office: "I can see the powers that be in the police department saying, 'Here's our out.'"
What basis is there for this allegation? The reporters ask a rhetorical question and then answer it themselves, ignoring the answer they got from the Medical Examiner in favor of their own speculation.
According to this writing, there are absolutely no facts anyone has for this absurd allegation. This is nothing more than speculation - which is of course completely false - that just gets thrown out there as truth.
FALSE: “A man who had just returned home from a trip smelled a "foul odor" coming from a plastic air mattress in the bedroom of a roommate he hadn't seen in weeks. When he started pulling debris from the mattress, he saw a grotesquely decomposed human head. The rest of the body was cocooned in garbage. Investigators opened the bag to find that the corpse was a woman's, wrapped in a blood-soaked blanket. She was wearing turquoise jogging pants, a black camisole, a hoodie, and boots. Police identified her as Michelle Manalansan, 29, a student at Harold Washington College. She had last been seen at her downtown apartment on February 9. The police report adds that investigators were told by witnesses that the absent roommate "was the last person seen with [Michelle]." The roommate, police learned, was wanted by the Cook County sheriff for a probation violation. They also learned that a relative had bought him a ticket to Los Angeles on a train that left Chicago six days after Manalansan disappeared. Despite the circumstances, police classified the case as a noncriminal death investigation. A detective soon made it an even lower priority: He suspended the case until the roommate could be "located and interviewed." Manalansan's death certificate on file with the Cook County clerk's office says that she died by homicide—specifically, blunt head and neck trauma. But at presstime, her case had still not been classified as criminal. The roommate was still at large.
Chicago Magazine never asked CPD for the status or facts surrounding any of the cases they feature in this story.
If the reporters had bothered to do so, they would have learned through the course of this investigation, and with additional information newly available, the case of victim Manalansan was in fact reclassified as a murder on March 23, 2014 (more than two weeks before this story was published).
Additional interviews with possible witnesses have been scheduled.
FALSE: "One factor, as the Tribune first noted, was the department excluded from the count three homicides that occurred within city limits but on expressways patrolled by state police. Before McCarthy's arrival, the department did not exclude such crimes from its homicide total, according to longtime police sources."
CPD does not report crimes that happen in other jurisdictions, nor has it ever done so.
Expressways have been included in the UCR reporting of the State Police since 1982, when McCarthy was a 23 year-old Police Officer in the Bronx borough of New York City.
FALSE AND MISLEADING: “In August—typically Chicago's hottest month—the stress inside Chicago Police Department headquarters was palpable. That's when several police insiders first told Chicago about what they called "the panel." Said to be made up of a small group of very high-level officers, the panel allegedly began scrutinizing death cases in which the victims didn't die immediately or where the circumstances that led to the deaths couldn't be immediately determined, sources say. Panel members were looking for anything that could be delayed, keeping it off the books for a week, a month, maybe a year. "Whatever the case may be, it had to wait until it came back from the panel," says a well-placed police insider. "All this was to hide the murder numbers, that's all they are doing." (How many cases did get delayed, if any, is unknown.)”
There is not, and never has been, any attempt to keep crimes “off the books.”
All murders and shootings are reviewed on a daily basis by the Bureau of Detectives to ensure the accuracy of the reports concerning each incident – as would be expected. The Bureau of Detectives also does random internal audits of murder cases in each police area four times a year to ensure the accuracy of case files and data.
Additionally, CPD’s Quality Assurance Unit takes a number of steps to ensure all other crimes are accurately tracked, and responded to. The team conducts random sampling of case reports from districts to ensure their accuracy. Additionally, every case report in which the UCR code is changed get reviewed by Quality Assurance, and again by detectives to ensure the articulation of the incident fits the criteria for new UCR code.
CPD takes the tracking, compiling and reporting of crime data extremely seriously as that information informs our policing strategies and our deployment, and is shared with the public to provide an accurate understanding of crime conditions.
FALSE AND MISLEADING: Two days after gunfire lit up Cornell Park, an extra-alarm fire erupted in a three-story apartment building at 112th Street and King Drive, in the Roseland neighborhood. When firefighters arrived just before 2 a.m., much of the building and the stairwell was engulfed in flames. Inside, they found Millicent Brown-Johnson, 28, in a purple nightgown, her body covered in black soot, unconscious on the floor of her third-floor apartment. Her eight-year-old son, Jovan Perkins, was passed out in the stairwell, ravaged by second- and third-degree burns, according to the police report. Ambulances rushed them to the hospital. Brown-Johnson, who had been working at the American Girl Place store on Michigan Avenue as she pursued a degree in physical therapy, did not survive. Perkins, a second grader, died later that night. Firefighters and police immediately determined the fire to be suspicious. The next day they found a plastic gas container inside a garbage can in Palmer Park, across the street from the charred building. On September 28, the medical examiner's office ruled that both mother and son had died of smoke inhalation and that, based on the police and fire department investigations, their deaths were homicides. However, the case was classified as a death investigation, not a murder investigation, and the police did not include the two deaths in their year-end homicide count. Nor have police caught the arsonist.
Given that it’s apparent the reporters have access to police reports on this case, it’s shocking that they failed to include all the information on this incident. Arson Detectives could not determine a cause of the fire and debris samples recovered from the area of origin and sent to the ISP lab for testing were negative for accelerants. This case remains an active investigation with the several interviews completed the first week of March 2014.
Chicago Police Detectives could not determine a cause of the fire based on their investigations. The fire is certainly suspicious, and while there is no evidence that this was an arson, to date it has not been ruled out.
No accelerant was found at the scene.
The gas can found in the alley was not connected to the incident (it belonged to a neighbor who had thrown it out several days prior).
There is no motive in this case.
There is nothing to indicate anyone else was in the building at the time of the fire.
With that information, this incident cannot be classified as a murder.
Further, the article states "the medical examiner's office ruled that both mother and son had died of smoke inhalation and that, based on the police and fire department investigations, their deaths were homicides." This is false. The ME's report says they did in fact die of smoke inhalation but the "manner of death is pending further police and fire investigation".
FALSE: “Excluding Brown-Johnson and Perkins from Chicago's homicide statistics helped the September numbers clock in at 42 rather than 44. At this point, the 2011 numbers were actually beginning to look beatable.”
The suggestion here is outrageous and completely false. CPD investigates cases with the sole intention of catching the offenders. Statistics are never a factor – ever.
The only murder goal is 0. There is no goal of “beating” another year for PR purposes.
FALSE: The official year-to-date homicide count was now 376. With just one month of 2013 remaining, it now seemed a safe bet that the total wouldn't top 2011's count of 435. But why settle there? According to police insiders, McCarthy and his deputies now hungered to reach a new goal: to keep 2013's number of homicides below 400, the lowest level since before Americans first landed on the moon. "They wanted to really have the big headline," says a detective.
Again, the suggestion is outrageous and false (beyond the obvious unsubstantiated speculation of an unnamed source). The goal of reducing murders is to save lives – not to generate headlines.
The only murder goal is 0. There is no goal of “beating” another year for PR purposes.
And, by the way, while Chicago had more than 400 murders the city did have the lowest level of homicides (in number and by murder rate) since before Americans first landed on the moon.
FALSE AND MISLEADING: “Just after 5 a.m. on November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, a 2012 Chevy sedan with four men inside sped along a residential street in the Pill Hill neighborhood on the city's Far South Side. Driving conditions were good: clear, no ice, no snow. Yet the car suddenly veered off the road near the intersection of 93rd and Constance, sliding into the opposite lane, clipping a parked vehicle, sailing over the curb, and bashing into a light pole. It stopped only after hitting a tree. When police got to the car, they found that the three passengers had suffered only minor injuries. However, the driver, a 22-year-old named Patrick Walker, was unresponsive, according to the police report. Officers assumed that he had suffered serious head trauma in the accident. An early case report from the medical examiner's office said that "brain matter" was found on the steering wheel. The young man was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he died two hours later. Police told the Tribune that "alcohol was suspected as a factor in the crash." Later that day, however, an autopsy showed that Walker had not died from the accident. He had been killed by a single gunshot to his right temple. Interestingly, the Sun-Times had already reported that police found one of Walker's passengers, Ivery Isom, 22, with a loaded Glock 9 mm and a 20-round ammunition clip at the accident scene. Police also found a bullet shell in the back seat, according to the police report. (Isom was charged with two counts of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. He pled not guilty; at presstime, his next court appearance was scheduled for April 28.) On November 30, a pathologist deferred the cause and manner of Walker's death "pending police investigation." That means the autopsy is inconclusive until the police further investigate the circumstances of his death. Walker's death certificate, filed with the Cook County clerk's office, says that he was murdered. No one disputes that he died from a bullet in his brain. But at presstime—four months after the shooting—the public record shows Walker's case inexplicably classified not as a homicide but as a death investigation.”
Again, here’s another case that the reporters at Chicago Magazine decided not to ask CPD about.
The investigation to this point revealed that Patrick Walker and his friends were driving in his car. They were intoxicated and also under the influence of drugs. One of his friends was playing with a gun when it accidentally discharged, killing Walker.
We have done extensive interviews with witnesses and family members in this case and at this point in the investigation everything points to an accidental shooting. That is why the person who fired the weapon has been charged with aggravated UUW in connection with the incident.
FALSE: Two weeks earlier, in fact, various media outlets had reported details of an odd change in how Chicago's police department was counting "delayed homicides"—those in which there is a time lag between injury and death. "To meet federal and state guidelines," the Sun-Times said, police reviewed all murders in 2013 and 2012. "Under those guidelines, a murder should be classified in the year the person was injured, and not in the year the person died." Huh? There were never any changes to federal guidelines, a FBI spokesman told Chicago. The standards of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program make it crystal clear that a homicide should be reported in the year of the victim's death. Next we called the Illinois Uniform Crime Report—a one-person office within the state police department that collects statistics from law enforcement agencies in Illinois—to check whether the state rule on delayed homicides had changed in 2013. The staffer told us that it hadn't; that delayed homicides in Illinois have always been counted in the year of injury. Confused? So were we. So we e-mailed Adam Collins, the director of news affairs for the Chicago Police Department. He e-mailed back: "In late 2013 . . . CPD began working to bring the city into stricter adherence with federal reporting standards. The Unified Crime Reporting System dictates each agency follow their state reporting procedures for federal reporting. According to Illinois reporting procedures, murders where the injury and death occurred in different years are to be tracked to the year of the incident, and CPD had for years been including these incidents in the wrong year." However, every Chicago police leader, officer, and administrator with whom we spoke says that hasn't been the department's practice. It's not a murder until the injured person dies, they point out. Before then, it's an aggravated battery. "CPD is interpreting the state guidelines incorrectly," says an expert source on Chicago Police Department statistics. "It's a numbers game."
Somehow the reporters actually get the facts right (except the ridiculous sourced comment at the end) and still make it seem as though there’s something untoward taking place.
It’s this simple: for years CPD had been tracking murders where the injury and death took occurred in different years (i.e., person shot in 2011 dies in 2012) to the year of the death as opposed to the year of the incident. That was incorrect by state and federal Uniform Crime Reporting standards (over seen by the FBI).
The source at the end of this segment, and apparently the reporters, miss the whole point. It doesn’t matter how CPD had been doing it for years – for years they had been doing it wrong according to state reporting standards. That’s not CPD policy, that’s the reporting guidelines we’re supposed to follow.
CPD officials met with national Uniform Crime Reporting experts and spoke with their counterparts at police departments from around the country to incorporate best practices for tracking crime data that’s in line with the federal standards under the Uniform Crime Report. For several months, detectives reviewed every shooting incident from 2012 and 2013 to ensure the reporting is in line with federal standards.
This resulted in four UCR murders that had occurred in previous years yet had been incorrectly been tabulated in 2013 to be reclassified to the correct year. We also went back and did the same calculation for 2012, which - along with another reclassification due to additional investigation - reclassified seven murders from that year to the correct years. In keeping with UCR standards, these murders are now properly attributed to the time of the incident rather than when the victim died.
As the reporters note, we have been very transparent about this – talking openly with media about it at the time the review was taking place.
MISLEADING: “Did the department add back those five murders to 2011? It doesn't appear so… How is it fair to compare 2013's homicide totals with those of years before the department changed the rules of the game?”
Perhaps the reporters didn’t recognize this, but adding the murders to 2011 would have inflated the percentage decline over 2011 – so the fact the CPD did not add them in 2011 contradicts the reporters’ own argument.”
FALSE: “New Year's revelry was still in full swing on January 1, 2014, when the Chicago Police Department sent out an e-mail blast just after 2 a.m. The subject line: "Chicago Ends 2013 at Historic Lows in Crime and Violence, More Work Remains." Despite the measured tone of that last phrase, the chest thumping was deafening: "fewest murders since 1965"; "lowest murder rate since 1966"; "lowest overall crime rate since 1972"; "fewest robberies, burglaries, motor vehicle thefts and arsons in recorded history." And on and on, percentage after percentage, statistic after statistic after statistic. But try this: Add back the 10 cases Chicago found that, if classified as sources say they should have been, would have counted as homicides. (There may be more.) Add back the four homicides that occurred on Chicago's expressways. Add, too, the four delayed homicides that the department had stripped out in December. What you get is not 414 murders in 2013, but at least 432.
Chicago Magazine’s own math is off, and they have the facts wrong:
They (falsely) took issue with six cases (seven victims), not 10
Expressway murders have not been part of CPD’s jurisdiction since 1982 and have not been included in the city’s tally since that time – so you wouldn’t add them “back”
The four delayed murders are attributed to the correct year now, in accordance with Uniform Crime Reporting standards – so you wouldn’t add them “back” either