(Wall Street Journal) — The New York Police Department on Monday begins posting data on citywide misdemeanor crime complaints dating back 10 years, partly in response to claims that withholding such statistics indicated it had something to hide, officials said. Academicians and journalists suspicious of the veracity of the NYPD’s long-shrinking total of “index crimes”—murders, rapes, robberies, felony assaults, grand larcenies, burglaries and auto thefts—have theorized that the police department is downgrading many of these serious crimes into misdemeanors and thereby artificially dropping the city’s crime rate. The index-crime rate for 2010 is expected to register a decline for the 22nd consecutive year.
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