David Simon says that homicide is the hardest crime stat to fudge, since there's a body and the different rate changes between homicide and other crimes is actually used to try to measure how much the stats are being fudged.
http://davidsimon.com/portfolio-item/the-audacity-of-despair
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/CexR...
Simon says:
In this culture, if you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse some statistics. I learned as a reporter to start despising statistics, and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was pulling it out and using it.
As I got better as a reporter, I realized that as soon as any of our institutions create a means of measuring themselves in terms of quality, someone is running behind them in that institution to figure out a way of destroying that statistic as a meaningful measure of anything.
In education it's No Child Left Behind and standardized test scores. In the police department, it's crime statistics and clearance rates. In the journalism it's Pulizer Prizes.
These stats don't have to do with anything once the people looking to advance themselves and their agenda, and to protect their institution, get done with them.
...
It's not corruption in the sense of somebody thinking "I am here to make Baltimore worse", or "make the retaining walls in New Orleans collapse yet again". It's somebody thinking "I don't want it landing on me, I want my day to be easier than yours, and I want you to think well of me until I get out of this job".
...
You know how you unfound a robbery report? A guy comes in to report a robbery in a place like south-west Baltimore, you say, "are you sure the guy had bullets in the gun? Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn't just a larceny, are you sure he didn't just take your wallet from you? Oh, you're really insisting, he did have a gun, you saw the bullets, it was a real gun? Hold on, we've got to run a warrant check on you. We gotta see if there's any paper on you. You don't have any paper on you? Oh, by the way, door's over there."
Robberies in the south-west district of Baltimore went down 70% in just one year.
When time came to reduce the murder rate, the same trick didn't work -- you can't hide the bodies, and it's the state Health Department which defines murders.
It's a really powerful piece.
You will have an increase suicide rate, but it won't effect the criminal rate.
Even in the darkest days of Baltimore I don't think there were allegations of homicides being declared as suicides.
I will agree that from a practical standpoint it seems far fetched to think they could get away with mislabeling homicides on any significant scale.