Police Manipulations of Crime Reporting: Insiders’ Revelations

Social scientists have theorized about the corruption of crime reports (Bayley, 1983; Campbell, 1976). Yet, scant empirical research has examined the impact of modern policing methods on the accuracy of crime reporting. Our research uses an anonymous survey of 1,770 retired New York City police officers examining retirees’ experiences with crime report manipulations across their years of retirement. This includes retirees from the community policing as well as police performance management eras. We subject the data to various statistical tests including tabular analysis, graphical trends to visualize the data, MANOVA, and logistic regression to explain report manipulations. Results indicate that the misuse of the performance management system and pressures on officers from management are key explanations for manipulating crime reports. Individual explanatory variables such as gender, educational status, rank, race, and marital status had no effect. Our research supports Bayley’s and Campbell’s theories. We recommend greater transparency to remedy this.     

The significance of gas chromatographic impurity patterns obtained from illicitly produced amphetamine

This paper describes a series of experiments designed to assess the evidential significance of gas chromatographic impurity patterns obtained from illicitly produced amphetamine. The experiments, based on the Leuckart route of amphetamine manufacture, were designed to investigate: the effect of reaction conditions on the production of known impurities, and the possibility that different chemists could produce amphetamine with identical impurity patterns by rigidly following the same synthetic procedure. The study provides strong support for the assumption that, if two illicit samples have the same impurity pattern, they have originated from the same batch.