A D.C. inspector general investigation found the failure to properly record 383 criminal offense reports was the fault of a crime analyst and not that of a district commander accused of under-reporting crime statistics.
The investigation was launched amid allegations that the district commander was underreporting criminal offenses, and after 480 offense reports were discovered in a desk and on a table in the Southeast Washington district office. The offenses occurred between 1997 and 2004 within a police district that was commended for lowering its crime rate.
The Office of Inspector General investigation found that 383 reports had not been properly recorded in the Metropolitan Police Department computer tracking system and 212 had not been entered into the database at all. More than half of the unrecorded offenses were serious crimes, like murder, robbery and rape, that were supposed to be reported to the FBI. They were not.
But the investigation didn’t find evidence that then-7th District Cmdr. Winston Robinson Jr. attempted to under-report criminal offenses. Instead, the investigation pinned the unreported crime offenses on a crime analyst who has since retired. Robinson in 2004 was promoted to assistant chief.
The investigation did reveal that some serious crimes were downgraded to minor offenses. For example, the commander instructed police that a witness needed to have seen a suspect breaking into a vehicle in order to classify a report as an “attempted stolen auto,” a crime analyst told investigators. The same was true for “stolen tags,” a crime that must be reported to the FBI. Unless the complainant actually witnessed someone committing the crime, the commander directed subordinates to re-classify the offense as “lost property,” the analyst said.
Officer Kristopher Baumann, head of the D.C. police union that had asked for the investigation, on Wednesday said the Inspector General’s Office and the District should “be ashamed for covering up the misbehavior” of a commander who was in charge and who benefited from the under-reported crime statistics while blaming the retired police officer.
