New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton and his predecessor are in an escalating feud over whether the city is cooking the books on crime statistics.
Former Commissioner Raymond Kelly came under fire by the New York Police Department Wednesday after lobbing accusations this week that the NYPD was undercounting shootings by not tallying some victims who suffered graze wounds or other minor injuries.
The NYPD on Wednesday issued a fact sheet to refute Mr. Kelly’s accusations, noting that a victim who suffers a graze wound from a bullet is counted as a shooting victim, while those who are injured by flying glass during a shooting are not — and weren’t during Mr. Kelly’s time at the helm of the department.
Meanwhile, Commissioner Bratton took to the airwaves to defend the department he has twice led.
During an interview Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Commissioner Bratton suggested Mr. Kelly’s accusations were nothing more than a publicity stunt for his recently released memoir, “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City.”
“The first casualty of politics is usually the truth,” Commissioner Bratton said. “Mr. Kelly is selling a book. The New York Post is reporting he is thinking about running for mayor. I am standing by my crime statistics because they are factual. They are the truth. Everything he said yesterday in his statement we have refuted, we have rebutted.”
The war of words kicked off last week, when Mr. Kelly first insinuated during an interview that something was amiss with the city’s crime numbers and that someone ought to take “a hard look” at the statistics.
On Tuesday Commissioner Bratton lashed out, calling the accusations “outrageous” and challenging the former commissioner to back up his charges.
“My cops work hard, very hard, to reduce gun violence in this city,” Commissioner Bratton said. “So for him to denigrate that hard work that has resulted in shootings being reduced significantly in this city and claim in some fashion that we are playing with the numbers, shame on him.”
Mr. Kelly, the longest-serving police commissioner in the city’s history, issued a statement afterward noting that members of the department had informed him that the current top brass had altered how shooting victims are counted. He said individuals who suffer graze wounds from gunshots are “often not counted” as shooting victims and that individuals who are injured by gunfire but refuse to cooperate with police investigators have their injuries recorded as self-inflicted.
In the statement released Wednesday, NYPD officials noted that there was a shooting on Christmas in which a victim was uncooperative with investigators, and it was later determined by obtaining surveillance footage recording of the shooting that the man had shot himself accidentally. The NYPD said that incident was classified as self-inflicted.
However, officials said, a lack of cooperation does not equate with a classification as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
NYPD officials said the department’s crime reporting manual has kept the same standards for classifying an incident as a shooting since 2012, and that crime numbers have fallen as the standards have remained the same.
As of Dec. 20, the NYPD recorded 339 homicides in 2015 and 1,309 shooting incidents, according to its latest weekly CompStat report.
Though it did not provide updated figures, the NYPD on Wednesday noted that, as of Monday, homicides are up by a total of 15 this year compared to this time last year.
Homicide totals in New York reached a record low in 2014. With 328 homicides that year, the city saw the fewest slaying since the NYPD started keeping reliable numbers in 1963.
• Andrea Noble can be reached at anoble@washingtontimes.com.
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