Reclassifying crimes. Refusing to take police reports. Fudging the numbers to further political careers.

Name an accusation and it’s been lobbed at the Baltimore Police Department about its crimes statistics.

But in an interview with The Examiner, new Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld passionately defended the city’s statistics as the most accurate in Maryland.

“I’m entirely confident in those numbers,” Bealefeld said. “Our level of control and scrutiny is second to no one in the state. We have a staff review section that reviews every single report that comes through the door. Not a random sampling. Not a core sampling of 10 percent of all the violent crime reports. Every single one.”

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During the recent mayoral election, City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell and State Del. Jill Carter even called for a federal Department of Justice audit of Baltimore’s crime statistics -- when the department’s numbers showed violent crime decreasing, despite a rise in murders and shootings.

Without advocating “for or against” an audit, Bealefeld stressed that civilian reviewers will catch reports and often upgrade their seriousness.

“If an officer writes up a common assault report and describes choking, you know what happens? It gets sent back to command and it gets classified as an aggravated assault,” Bealefeld said. “Very few major police departments in the country have that level of scrutiny.”

Part of the problem with departmental statistics is the media’s insistence on focusing solely on murders rather than other crimes, he said.

“The murder rate is the lead story on every nightly broadcast. That’s what makes the headlines,” Bealefeld said. “No one has written a single line — not a single line —- to say there hasn’t been a murder yet in the month of October. We’ve had six straight days of zeros going back into September. If I had eight murders in eight days, they’d have experts up and down the East Coast blasting me. You’re a failure when murders happen, but you’re not a success when they don’t?”

Johns Hopkins University criminologist Sheldon Greenberg, who said he’s glad to see Bealefeld get the job, cautioned against placing too much emphasis on crime statistics.

“There’s a wide gap between statistics and quality policing,” Greenberg said. “Lots of times people talk about homicide statistics as if it’s some indicator of quality. Homicide statistics don’t affect most people on a day-to-day basis. You can have great statistics and still have people living in fear.

“People want high visibility uniform patrol in neighborhoods, parking lots and shopping centers. They want to know the police protect them. Those things are far ahead of statistics.”

lbroadwater@baltimoreexaminer.com