In an earlier post on Chicago’s declining murder rate, the decline didn’t seem to prove anything about gun control or gun ownership (in any direction) and I asked “So, what happened?”

V the K suggested a different explanation by sending this link, The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates. Short answer: Someone has been cooking the books.

On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a homicide…the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death investigation…

The change stunned officers. Current and former veteran detectives who reviewed the Groves case at Chicago’s request were just as incredulous.

Was it just a coincidence, some wondered, that the reclassification occurred less than two weeks before the end of the year, when the city of Chicago’s final homicide numbers for 2013 would be tallied? …

For the case of Tiara Groves is not an isolated one. Chicago [Magazine, the authors] conducted a 12-month examination of the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics going back several years…We identified 10 people…whose cases were reclassified…, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.

This troubling practice goes far beyond murders…Chicago found dozens of other crimes, including serious felonies such as robberies, burglaries, and assaults, that were misclassified, downgraded to wrist-slap offenses, or made to vanish altogether…

Does the problem start at the top? Evidently:

Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances…One detective refers to the “magic ink”: the power to make a case disappear. Says another: “The rank and file don’t agree with what’s going on. The powers that be are making the changes.”

…sources describe a practice that has become widespread at the same time that top police brass have become fixated on demonstrating improvement in Chicago’s woeful crime statistics…

…the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil pols on Chicago’s City Council have mostly accepted the police department’s crime numbers at face value. So have most in the media. You can hardly turn on the news without hearing McCarthy or Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaiming unquestioned: Murders down 18 percent in 2013! Overall crime down 23 percent! Twelve thousand fewer crime victims! “These days, everything is about media and public opinion,” says one longtime officer. “If a number makes people feel safe, then why not give it to them?”

There’s much more, including a Part 2 yet to come.