| When Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn touted the city's fourth-straight year of falling crime in February, hundreds of beatings, stabbings and child abuse cases were missing from the count, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found. More than 500 incidents since 2009 were misreported to the FBI as minor assaults and not included in the city's violent crime rate, the investigation found. That tally is based on a review of cases that resulted in charges - only about one-fifth of all reported crimes. Yet the misreported cases found in 2011 alone are enough that Flynn would have been announcing a 1.1% increase in violent crime in February, instead of a 2.3% decline from the reported 2010 numbers, which also include errors. Missing, for example, was the case of Crystal L. Mitchell, 21, who last May grabbed a 9-inch serrated steak knife during an argument with her uncle, stabbed him in his thigh and slashed his arm. And the case of John F. Sanford, 57, who in December bound his 6-year-old stepson's arms and legs, covered his mouth with duct tape and struck him some 90 times with a belt, later telling him: "I was trying to make you (expletive) on yourself." A doctor at Children's Hospital found cuts and bruises all over the boy's body. Based on FBI reporting guidelines, both should have been classified as aggravated assaults, the city's most common violent crime. Instead, they were reported as simple assaults, a category reserved for shoving matches and slaps to the face. At ... |
