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Manhattan’s 10th Precinct, and that in the 50th Precinct, again, in March 2003, police refused to take robbery complaints from restaurant delivery people.
    By then, there were only these few episodes, which the NYPD quickly dismissed as both proof of the quality of its oversight and isolated cases by rogue commanders. But then, in March 2004, Leonard Levitt and Rocco Parascandola of
Newsday
reported on a series of questionable cases, including the punishment of an officer who refused to downgrade a felony to a misdemeanor, a former police official who had intervened to get detectives to take a report, a precinct commander who was discouraging robbery victims from reporting crimes, officers talking victims out of filing reports, and the reuse of crime complaint numbers. After the articles went to press, Patrick Lynch, president of the powerful Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), the largest of the city’s police unions, and Ed Mullins, the head of the sergeants’ union, held a press conference and called on Kelly to investigate crime complaint manipulation across the city.
    “With 5,000 fewer police officers than we had five years ago, we can no longer hold the line on crime, forcing local commanders to artificially hold down the crime statistics,” Lynch said in a written statement.
    Mullins chimed in by pointing out that accurate information was one of the bedrock principles of CompStat. “Deployment of police resources is based on where and when crime is occurring so underreporting felony crime makes a neighborhood more dangerous for the community and the sergeants and police officers who patrol the area,” he said.
    A month prior to these statements, 400 PBA delegates had issued a vote of no confidence in Kelly and called for his immediate resignation. That vote was sparked by other issues, including Kelly’s “draconian” disciplinary system and his handling of a police shooting of an unarmed civilian. Kelly’s people defended the 50th Precinct commander, flatly rejected the allegation that crime was being suppressed, and suggested that the union simply had an agenda to embarrass the commissioner. They also insisted that the NYPD carefully monitors crime reporting, and any unreported crimes are simply errors that rarely take place.
    The NYPD was worried about articles attacking the accuracy of the crime statistics, and rightly so. The city’s entire reputation is underpinned by the accuracy of its crime stats. It is the most important bellwether of the city’s health, and low crime meant more tourists, more economic development,more revenue. Any perception that crime was increasing, or that the numbers were inaccurate, could damage the city’s growth.
    Lynch’s statements would prove to be the most powerful broadside over the crime stats, but they would go nowhere. Kelly rejected the call for an investigation, and no outside monitors stepped in to examine the crime numbers. Lynch never said another public word about manipulation of crime statistics. The City Council, which holds hearings at the drop of a hat, did nothing. The city and state comptrollers stayed out of it. The feds stayed out of it. The lone voice who did try at least to step up was Mark Pomerantz, then head of the Mayor’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption, a body formed by Giuliani following the Mollen Commission of 1992, which investigated corruption in the NYPD. By 2004, the commission was a gutted shell of its former self, confining itself to issuing reports on relatively minor issues and cloaking its activities in repressive secrecy.
    Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor who had handled major cases, decided to take on Kelly and Bloomberg, and asked for NYPD records so the commission could examine whether crime was being downgraded to create the perception that things were better than they were. Kelly refused to cooperate, saying that Pomerantz was overreaching his authority, which of course he was not. Pomerantz