Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an engineering major in college, has never been shy about proclaiming an unerring faith in statistics.
He created 311 as a way to collate data, and improve the lives of New Yorkers. He has whipped out education data to justify extending mayoral control, reward star employees and close laggard schools. Rarely does a month go by without Mr. Bloomberg citing data analysis as the marrow not just of his administration, but also of his private-sector career and his philanthropic foundation.
“I’m a great believer in the wisdom I learned in my first Wall Street job: In God we trust,” he said at a philanthropy conference in Atlanta last May. “Everyone else, bring data.”
But what if the data were somehow skewed?
That question has emerged as one of the by-products of a survey conducted by two criminologists that has raised doubts about the integrity of the New York Police Department’s highly regarded crime tracking program, CompStat. Relying on the anonymous responses of hundreds of retired high-ranking police officials, the survey found that tremendous pressure to reduce crime, year after year, prompted some supervisors and precinct commanders to distort crime statistics.
The survey did not address critical issues, like when the manipulation of the data was supposed to have occurred. So it is impossible to ascertain whether much of the skewing might have happened shortly after CompStat was started in 1995 under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, or whether it may have continued or even worsened since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002.
