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S.F. police chief tells commission crime data are 'corrupt,' says fixes will take months and money

San Francisco Police Commission · December 16, 2009
AI-Generated Content: All content on this page was generated by AI to highlight key points from the meeting. For complete details and context, we recommend watching the full video. so we can fix them.

Summary

Chief reported miscoding, duplicate reports and long-standing quality-control failures that undercut the departments crime statistics, including an estimated 1,200 underreported felony domestic-violence cases a year; he outlined short-term fixes, estimated costs and staffing gaps.

San Francisco Police Chief William J. Gascon told the Police Commission on Dec. 16 that the department has uncovered widespread problems in its crime-data systems that have produced inaccurate public statistics and underreporting to federal authorities.

Gascon said cases are frequently miscoded when they are entered into the departments records feed, sometimes creating duplicate report numbers for a single incident or failing to reclassify cases when investigations change the facts. "We either do not have the right coding or sometimes because theres too much discretion cases are being miscoded," he said. He told commissioners the department has identified roughly 1,200 felony domestic-violence cases per year that were not being reported to the Department of Justice.

The chief…

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