Undoubtedly, there are some good officers in the ranks of the Kansas City Police Department. But these men and women can only be embarrassed by the incompetence of command officers in keeping track of our soaring crime rate.
The problem first came to light last summer when the City Auditor found crime statistics were being grossly underreported.
A national study released this week lists New Orleans as the most violent city. St. Louis ranks as the fourth most violent U.S. city ranking with Camden, N.J., Detroit and Oakland in the top five.
Kansas City was 18th on the list in the 2007 rankings out of several hundred cities. And Kansas City likely would have ranked even worse in the 2008 rankings because violent crime increased in 2007.
Kansas City, Kan., was ranked as No. 42. But Kansas City, Missouri wasn’t ranked at all due to missing data. In other words, Kansas City failed to report.
As historian and KCTribune columnist William Worley has pointed out, crime statistics can be manipulated. That should not come as a shock to anyone familiar with Kansas City history. Tom Pendergast used to proclaim that “Kansas City is a clean, well-ordered town.” Of course, Pendergast controlled much of the way in which it was ordered.
Worley pointed out that, more recently, in the 1950s; a Kansas City police chief apparently presided over a department that manipulated crime statistics, especially those covering burglary and larceny, in order to make the crime situation in Kansas City appear better or worse than in other cities.
If he was trying to increase the police department’s budget through the state-appointed Board of Police Commissioner’s, Chief Bernard Brannon was accused of allowing all reports of burglaries and robberies to flow freely through the department’s main record department. On other occasions when it was more politic to demonstrate department efficiency, such as after receiving a funding increase, there was strong evidence that the reports of burglaries and robberies were often filed away and never placed in the central record keeping system.
The recent record-keeping problems of the Kansas City Police Department have been attributed to computer problems. However, most computer problems can be attributed to “garbage in, garbage out.”
In the opinion of KCTribune, enough time has elapsed since the City Auditor’s study to provide an adequate explanation for the problem. In the next few weeks, we will look for an adequate explanation of Chief James Corwin’s record-keeping problems.
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