We reported on Wednesday about the terrible job that Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has done, not on the crime numbers, though those are certainly important, but on managing and leading the Department.
But while leaders are normally called into account for the big things, it’s the little things that frequently don’t get noticed, but are indicative of a general attitude of sloppiness in an organization. While I, and others, have frequently taken screen captures of the Current Crime Statistics page, both others and I have normally taken only a restricted image, because by the time they get tweeted out or put in a website article, the entire page gets reduced to a size too small for people to read or appreciate the numbers; an example would be this image I posted previously.
I open the Current Crime Statistics page almost every morning, and yes, I’m gratified to see that homicides are down this year, on a daily basis, to 2021 and 2022, though they are ahead of 2020, the last year the city was under 500 homicides, though 499 isn’t under by very much, and we have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.
But I noticed, just this morning, something that I’ve completely cut off from most of my screen captures, the statement, “Annual percentage change compared to same day in 2021.” Uhhh, it’s now 2023, almost a third of a way into the year, and no one has changed it to “Annual percentage change compared to same day in 2022”? 2021 being the record, 562 murders, I wanted to do the math, and yes, the annual percentage change, obviously done byy the computer, is from the previous year, 2022, and not 2021.
That might seem to be a little thing, but it indicates a sloppiness in the Philadelphia Police Department.
Then there’s this:
That’s difficult to read, but you can click on it to enlarge it to full size. What it states is pretty simple:
The homicide statistics represent the daily count (statistics reflect the accurate count during normal business hours, Monday through Friday) and year-to-date total for victims of homicide and are subject to reclassification according to the rules and regulations of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) guidelines. The homicide statistics for years 2007 – 2018 have been submitted to the FBI as the final UCR numbers for the City of Philadelphia.
Is the Department really telling us that the last year in which they have submitted the final Uniform Crime Reports to the FBI was 2018, five years ago? The Current Crime Statistics page tells us that the last annual homicide report available is the one for 2016, though the weekly reports are available through last year.
These errors are easy things to fix; a high school kid could fix the Current Crime Statistics page — it’s very obviously a standard format, which need only to be fixed once a year — but somehow, some way, the Philadelphia Police Department have not done so yet.
The clearance rate on homicides in Philly was a pathetic 42% in 2020, the Commissioner’s first year. The clearance rate was just 36.7% for fatal shootings.
2022’s homicide clearance rate was up to almost 47%, but that is still below the national clearance rate.
In major organizations, sloppiness in the little things both leads to, and reflects, sloppiness in the big things. Yesterday’s story about homicide detectives missing appointments and not returning phone calls had the commander of the Homicide unit, Inspector Ernest Ransom, blaming in part the “crushing workload” on the failures, but if they are sloppy on the little things, how can we expect that they won’t be sloppy on bigger stuff? Inspector Ransom, who got that job just a couple of months ago, has a lot of work ahead of him, and certainly deserves some time to get things straight. But getting the little things straightened out is a good way to start getting the bigger problems fixed.
_______________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.
Oh, that’s not how the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating, softer-than-Charmin-on-crime District Attorney would put it, publicly, but that’s his intention.
