Last week, Sangamon County Sheriff Neil Williamson amended his agency’s crime statistics report for 2002 to include the murder of Dan DeFraties, a Springfield man who last March was robbed, abducted from the gas station where he worked, and brutally beaten to death by the side of a road. The fact that this particular roadside was beyond the city limits meant that DeFraties’s murder would not be counted in Springfield’s crime statistics but in the County’s statistics instead. But neither agency counted the homicide until the State Journal-Register ran a front-page story exposing this painful omission.
Unfortunately, the Sheriff’s amendment can’t repair all the statistical data relevant to the DeFraties case. Before he was murdered, DeFraties was the victim of three other crimes: he was robbed, his car was stolen, and he was kidnapped. While these crimes obviously pale in comparison to the subsequent murder, they did occur inside Springfield and should be counted in the city’s crime statistics.
But the Springfield Police Department counted only the most serious of those three–the armed robbery–in the batch of data submitted to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, police sources tell Illinois Times. The motor vehicle theft should have been counted but wasn’t. (The kidnapping wasn’t reported because it’s not a “Part I index crime” tracked by the FBI.) With the DeFraties case, this point seems insignificant. But SPD has been using the same method for all the crime stats it reports to federal agencies and to the public for the past several years.
Despite federal guidelines specifying that “all offenses occurring in an incident are to be reported,” SPD has been counting only one crime per “incident.” In some instances, the difference could seem minor. Say you’re in a bar and a fight breaks out. Police are summoned, and they write an incident report. The report says three people are beaten badly enough to have broken bones or require stitches. Should the incident count as one aggravated assault or three?
SPD apparently tracks such incidents by two different methods: “Table 2,” which is one crime per incident, and “Table 7,” which includes all relevant offenses. Illinois Times obtained printouts of tables showing Part I index crimes for the first 10 months of 2002, counted by Table 2 and by Table 7. Overall, the difference between these two methods amounts to a 6 percent understatement of crimes for the last 10 months.
But for crimes against persons (as opposed to property crimes), the difference is almost 20 percent higher on Table 7 than Table 2. And in one category, aggravated assault, Table 7 has almost 200 more incidents than Table 2, making the difference more than 25 percent. In the month of August 2002, there were 40 percent more aggravated assaults counted on Table 7 than on Table 2–925 on Table 7, and just 731 on Table 2.
Assistant Chief Jim Burton, who oversees the records department, initially told Illinois Times that the department was reporting Table 7 to the public and to UCR. A day later, he said SPD reports Table 2 and always has. “It makes it possible to compare year to year, apples to apples,” Burton says. He said this method is acceptable to state and federal agencies.
Guidelines issued by Illinois State Police called “Illinois Uniform Crime Reporting Program – Instructions” suggest the Table 7 method is the most relevant. Under the heading “Index Crime Offenses,” it states: “Count all offenses occurring in an incident.”
There are other problems within the records division that Burton does not deny, and most of those could be attributed to lack of sufficient personnel. For example, the records division occasionally falls so far behind on inputting traffic citations that people with tickets have shown up at the Sangamon County Circuit Court’s office, only to find there’s no record of their citation in the computer.
“Oh, that happens, rarely,” says circuit court clerk and mayoral candidate Tony Libri. “We just call over there [to SPD] and let them know.”
Burton confirms that SPD’s records office did fall behind during the holidays, when records workers were taking vacation time but patrol officers were running details looking for alcohol-impaired drivers. “It’s almost a double-whammy,” Burton says. “But we got that under control. We used overtime last week to get that all caught up.”
Other backlogs in records are more severe, sources tell Illinois Times. Data on stolen property and recovered property is backlogged more than 30 days. Arrest jackets for the years 2000 and 2001 have not been entered; data entry for the 2002 jackets is nine months behind schedule, according to Burton.Data on stolen property and recovered property is backlogged more than 30 days.
The records department made an effort to get everything caught up in 2001, as SPD was being evaluated by CALEA, or the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. Unprocessed records that had been stacked on the windowsills and ledges were input, at least in some abridged format, according to sources, and division employees went out and celebrated. But soon the backlog was as bad as before.
Such chaos has consequences: It makes it tough to return stolen goods to their rightful owners. And the holes in the suspect and arrest records could even endanger officers on the streets.
Springfield policemen’s union president Don Kliment says, “When an officer pulls a motorist over, you usually run a check by name or driver’s license number. You like to think the info on that person is current and up to date, so you know what you’re dealing with. You’d be at a disadvantage not having all the things you need to know.”
It’s small wonder SPD’s records division cuts so many corners when it is, by some measures, significantly understaffed. Joliet, for example, with 232 sworn officers compared to Springfield’s 280, has 13 employees in records. Naperville, with only 168 sworn officers, has 22 in records.
Prior to the mid-1990s, SPD had about a dozen workers in the records division. Then John Harris became chief of police and pledged to put more officers on the street. He cut the records department down to four and kept his promise about more patrol officers, thereby increasing the number of incident reports the records department had to process.
Now the records division has eight employees and one vacancy, which Burton just got clearance to fill. This makes SPD’s records department almost the exact same size as the corresponding department in the Sangamon Country Sheriff’s Department, where records manager Mike Walton–a former SPD chief–says his workers handle only a fraction of the number of reports SPD does. Furthermore, Walton says even his newest employees have three years in his department–five have a decade or more–while most of SPD’s records workers have less than five years on the job.
Tom McLaughlin, regional director of the union that represents these employees, says the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees has filed grievances on behalf of SPD records employees in the past. “The Union continues to have discussions over the stressful working conditions in this area and complained about the high volume of turnover and the need for more employees.”
Burton says the backlog problems will disappear when patrol officers get laptop
computers that will allow them to fill out citations, accident reports, and
police reports electronically from their patrol cars. The department received
a $435,000 federal grant last year to fund this project, expected to become
operational in about 18 months.
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2003.
