In the days before computers, the police had File 13, for "forget it."
The year was 1964, and Baltimore police discovered that half of the city's criminal complaints had not been properly reported. The police chief was forced to retire, the department established an internal affairs unit and lawmakers removed a restriction that only city residents could lead the agency.
Altering, fudging, manipulating and sometimes even ignoring crime has been a part of police work here and around the country since cops started counting and politicians started using the numbers to climb into office or to sabotage opponents.
In 1998, then-City Councilman Martin O'Malley, his eye on the mayor's office, accused police of engineering a "massive hoax" by purposely inflating the number of nonfatal shootings in 1993 to exaggerate their own 30 percent reduction that they had hailed three years later.
A study found that gunmen were aiming for the head and firing more lethal shots. Another review found that a computer glitch had counted every crime committed with a gun in 1993 as a shooting, regardless of whether the weapon had been fired.
When O'Malley claimed City Hall, he ordered 9,572 reports reclassified, turning the previous administration's 10 percent decline in crime into a 3.5 percent increase. An example: A cop burst into an apartment in time to stop a masked man armed with a shard of glass from raping a woman but wrote it up as a simple assault, which is not reported to the FBI. The audit upgraded it to an attempted rape, which is counted among national statistics.
Crime numbers are still being called into question. This month, Baltimore became the country's per-capita leader in homicides, but the title was short-lived: Detroit failed to report 33 killings to the FBI, and overnight Baltimore had to settle for second place, its rate of 36.9 killings per 100,000 residents edged out by a revised Detroit number of 37.4 per 100,000.
Critics continue to allege that police count multiple shooting victims at one scene as one shooting, that the medical examiner is hiding murder victims by ruling the cause of death "undetermined" in an inordinate number of cases and that authorities covered up a serial killer in Park Heights a few years ago.
Police talk about a decrease, but residents say crime is out of control, a feeling so pervasive that Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III had to address it earlier this month when he trotted out to the Inner Harbor to play down a rash of random assaults and proclaim that the waterfront is safer now than it was years ago.
