Crime Up or Down?

7/20/2009

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Story Published: Jul 21, 2009 at 12:35 PM EDT

Story Updated: Jul 21, 2009 at 12:35 PM EDT

Detroit Police clerical team in the spotlight of controversy...That's tonight's Big Story. A recent FBI study shows Detroit's crime has decreased in the last year. But the city's police chief believes the departments current crime statistics aren't correct. My TV 20's Jorge Avellan spoke with chief Warren Evans about the issue.

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After only two weeks as Detroit Police Chief, Warren Evans announced he expects Detroit's crime statistics to increase. And not because of actual crimes committed, but due to past poor crime record keeping witin the department.

Warren Evans
"There are under reported. Their are more crimes than there are more reportd generated because of the delays in backlogs. That's about as simply said as I can put it. And obviously when you try to plan garbage in garbage out. if you don't have good information you can't make the best decisions."

Chied Evans blames officer shift changes for the bad record keeping.

Warren Evans
"At the end of a shift their may be a back-log of a number of runs. Well that carry's forward to the next shift, but the next shift is as busy or more. So this back-log is continuing day in day out and at the end of that chain their are obviously complaints that falling off the radar screen."

Warren, who recently replaced former police chief James Barren says he has a plan to make sure the records kept is more accurante.

Warren Evans
"Quite frankly a system that a use to keep our records which doen't allow us to do it mobiliy. So if an officer goes to a significant run and a report needs to be generated that officer that officer does not have the ability to generate that report mobiliy. They have to go to the station to do it. That takes them out of service, while out of service new runs are come in that never get handle because that car is out of service. We may have to go back to having some reports done in pen rather than computarized."

Forbes dot com has listed Detroit as the most dangerous city in the country.

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