An audit of crime reporting by the Memphis Police Department (MPD) is “ridiculous,” one Memphis lawmaker said.
Last week, state Reps. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) and John Gillespie (R-Memphis) requested an unannounced audit of the way the MPD reports its crimes to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI). The pair issued the request in a letter to TBI Director David Rausch.
In the letter, Taylor and Gillespie said they’d been told MPD has sometimes intentionally fudged the numbers to, apparently, present a brighter picture of the city’s crime situation. It’s alleged that the agency may intentionally downgrade a burglary, a felony offense, to vandalism, a misdemeanor. An that sometimes the MPD documents formal reports as memos so they won’t appear in official crime statistics.
“If such practices are indeed occurring, the result is the suppression or distortion of crime statistics, undermining both public trust and the ability of law enforcement agencies to accurately assess and respond to criminal activity,” Taylor and Gillespie said in the letter. “The integrity of our crime data is essential-not only so citizens can have confidence in the numbers being reported, but also so law enforcement officers can understand the full scope of the challenges they face.”
State Rep. Jesse Chism (D-Memphis) said the request is a “waste of TBI resources” and the basis for it is a “ridiculous implication.”
“We don’t need people casting doubt on the work being done by the dedicated men and women of the MPD, just like we don’t need an armed occupation by the National Guard,” Chism said in a statement. “What we need are more laws to keep illegal guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them and more opportunities like tax breaks to help families put food on their tables.”