Do the crime, serve the time. Or so the old adage goes.
But that isn’t always the case. The Los Angeles Times reviewed dozens of cases the Los Angeles Police Department initially documented as serious but later downgraded to minor offenses.
“A third of the time, the decision to reclassify the incident was wrong, The Times concluded. When presented with the findings, LAPD officials acknowledged the errors but offered no explanation for them.”
“The errors raise new questions about the accuracy of LAPD crime statistics, which have come under scrutiny this year, criminal-justice experts said.
“A Times investigation last summer found that the LAPD significantly understated the city's true level of crime when it misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes from a recent one-year period ending in September 2013.”
You can read the full Times investigation and story here.