Legal News

Did Detroit Fudge The Numbers To Avoid the Murder Capital Tag?

By Chris Herring

Two weeks ago, Baltimore took the title that no city wants to win: The 2008 murder capital of the United States.

Of cities with 500,000 people or more, Baltimore reported the most. With 234 homicides — 37 per 100,000 city residents — Maryland’s largest city outpaced Detroit, which reported 33.8.

Or did it?

A Detroit News story claims that the Motor City’s police department intentionally underreported its number of homicides. The story suggests that was intentional on the part of city officials.

The article, which accuses Detroit police of an intentional “chronic undercounting” of homicides, pointed out that police there count murders differently than almost every other major city in the U.S.

Rather than report anything and everything that might classify as a homicide, Detroit police take a wait-and-see approach on killings that they think may have been accidents, suicides or acts of self-defense.

Most other cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia included — simply follow what the medical examiner says and reports them to the FBI as homicides.

Detroit police dispute that method.

“There’s homicide and there’s murder,” said Detroit Police Dep. Chief James Tolbert. “Now when the medical examiner still says it’s a homicide and we go on about our investigation and (in the course of) our investigation we present documents to the prosecutor’s office, they can say it’s self-defense. It’s ruled medically a homicide. But in the eyes of the prosecutor’s office they will not charge anybody with this.”

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy disagrees with that approach. “It is very, very clear in the language,” Worthy said. “Lawful self-defense is still a homicide and it still has to be counted as a homicide and it still has to be reported to the FBI.”

“What’s happening here is they’re excluding justifiable homicides when they shouldn’t be. Period.” said Worthy, whose jurisdiction includes the city of Detroit.

In any case, the Detroit News found that Detroit’s actual homicide rate in 2008 — 40.7 per 100,000 — was higher than Baltimore’s, making Motown the deadliest city in America. Also see here for a recent WSJ story on Detroit’s other urban woes.

Photo: Getty Images

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 18, 2009 (boomark / email).