LAPD Underreports Crime To Make LA Seem Safer, Captain Claims

LOS ANGELES (CNS) - High-ranking members Los Angeles Police Department are misclassifying violent crime in order to fool the public into thinking Los Angeles is safer than it really is, an LAPD Captain alleges.

Capt. Lillian Carranza, who oversees the LAPD's Van Nuys station, raised the alarm in 2014 when she notified her superiors of the underreporting of crime in the Foothill area, according to a claim filed last week against the city. In the eight-page claim, she states that she conducted her own analysis of violent crime reports stored in an LAPD database in 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported. According to Carranza, no action was taken.

Her findings were startling.

Aggravated assaults in 2016 were underreported by about 10 percent in the Pacific and Central divisions, according to the claim, which alleges that those cases were misclassified as less serious offenses, The Times reported.

The LAPD, according to Carranza's complaint, “engaged in a highly complex and elaborate coverup in an attempt to hide the fact that command officers had been providing false crime figures to the public attempting to convince the public that crime was not significantly increasing.”

More recent analysis of the Hollenbeck and Mission divisions by Carranza also showed a 10 percent undercounting of aggravated assaults in 2017, according to her claim, The Times reported.

The LAPD did not comment on Carranza's allegations, citing the pending litigation. But in a statement cited by The Times, LAPD spokesman Josh Rubenstein touted the accuracy of its crime statistics and the development of a special unit that scrutinizes its data.

"When errors are found, records are corrected and additional training and other corrective action is taken," Rubenstein said. "Integrity in all we say and do is a core value for the department and any accusation related to the accuracy of our reports will be taken very seriously and investigated as a potential disciplinary matter."

Carranza lodged multiple complaints about the data discrepancies and in September was told by a supervisor that she would not receive a promotion to commander because she was meddling into others' business, according to the claim. She is seeking damages for lost wages and pension money from missing the promotion as well as for emotional distress and unspecified physical injuries.

The allegations come after a 2014 Los Angeles Times investigation found that the LAPD misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes during a one-year span ending in September 2013. If recorded correctly, the figures for aggravated assaults in the yearlong period would have been nearly 14 percent higher, The Times found.

The newspaper also found that from 2005 to fall 2012, the LAPD misclassified an estimated 14,000 aggravated assaults as minor offenses, artificially lowering the city's violent crime rate.

After The Times' reports, a 2015 audit by the LAPD's inspector general estimated the department misclassified more than 25,000 aggravated assaults as minor incidents from 2008 to 2014.

Click here to read the full Los Angeles Times article.

City News Service contributed to this report; Photo: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, center at podium, and police chief Charlie Beck, center left, are among officials reporting about crime in the city at a downtown news conference Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016. Although crimes including murder and rape are up across the board in Los Angeles, the city is still far less violent than it has been in the past, city leaders said, as they released citywide statistics for 2015. (AP Photo/Amanda Myers)