Milwaukee police misreport burglaries as thefts, reducing their significance

A department riddled with errors and lies:

The misclassified case is one of more than 900 cases that should have been classified as burglaries but were marked as thefts by Milwaukee police since 2006, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.

Had the cases been properly coded, the tally of burglaries would have been 2.4% higher than reported during the past four years. Burglaries have risen 6.5% since Flynn became chief.

The findings are based on a review of incident report summary narratives that were compared with the FBI crime reporting rules and shared with crime-coding experts who independently agreed that a sample of the cases should have been coded as burglaries.

Police acknowledged Tuesday that a sample of cases shown to them by the Journal Sentinel were misclassified as thefts.

Via Watchdog Report @ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

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