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LAPD Underreported Violent Assaults While Bratton Was Commissioner: Report

By Ben Fractenberg | October 15, 2015 2:47pm
 The Los Angeles Police Department underreported serious assaults during a period that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton headed their department, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
The Los Angeles Police Department underreported serious assaults during a period that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton headed their department, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
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DNAinfo/Ben Fractenberg

MANHATTAN — The Los Angeles Police Department misclassified thousands of serious assaults as minor offenses during a period that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton was the head of the department, according to report by the Los Angeles Times.

There were about 14,000 misclassifications between 2005 and 2012, leading to a 7 percent reduction in violent crime, according to the report. Bratton was commissioner of the LAPD from 2002 to 2009.

"We know this can have a corrosive effect on the public's trust of our reporting," LAPD Assistant Chief Michel Moore told the Times. "That's why we are committed to ... eliminating as much of the error as possible."

Most of the cases reportedly involved violent attacks that resulted in injury, which were then misclassified as a “simple assault.”

Even with the skewed numbers, violent crime in Los Angeles still declined by nearly 60 percent from 2005 to 2012.

Bratton is known for championing “broken windows” policing, which focuses on enforcing lesser offenses like turnstile jumping in an effort to reduce more serious crimes.

He also oversaw implementation of the NYPD’s numbers-focused CompStat program in the mid-1990s.

The NYPD did not immediately return a request for comment.