What Rape?

St. Louis joins Philadelphia and Atlanta as cities whose police shelved rape cases. But only in St. Louis did an inquiry find little wrong with the practice.

Last November, Police Chief Joe Mokwa picked two of his employees and five outsiders to examine his department's crime reporting. He assembled the panel after the Post-Dispatch began asking questions about the department's crime data. A Post-Dispatch investigation found that police were using informal memos for hundreds of incidents instead of official reports that were included in FBI crime statistics.

In a report to the Police Board on Jan. 19, the panel applauded Mokwa for ending the use of informal memos to record crimes but said the practice had a negligible effect on the city's crime count. It also stood behind the department's methods for counting crimes.

The panel's chairman, Edward L. Dowd Jr., was responsible for reviewing the rapes and other sexual crimes that St. Louis police detectives wrote about in informal memos. He said he spent a Sunday reviewing about 88 memos written in 2004 that detailed claims of sexual crimes and found that none seemed credible.

"My conclusion is still the same, " Dowd said in an interview Aug. 11. "I don't think there was any attempt to conceal or fudge the numbers on the crime statistics."

The panel called itself independent. But a review of city records suggests otherwise. Four of the five outside members came from organizations with financial ties to the Police Department. Two academics on the panel, who did most of the analysis, had already made thousands of dollars from police contracts. Each is following up on the panel's findings through contracts awarded this year.

One member of the panel is a public relations consultant without any background in criminal justice. He confirmed in a recent interview that he did none of the analysis. His role was to help communicate the panel's findings to the public, he said.

The newspaper obtained the panel's notes and e-mail messages through a public records request. The material reveals that the audit never strayed far from the Police Department.

The panel's report was written by the police chief's speechwriter, Susan C. Ryan, who also wrote the talking points for Dowd, the panel's chairman.

"She was basically a person who put together our findings for us, " said Dowd, a former U.S. attorney who is now a partner in the Bryan Cave law firm.

The firm in March 2002 signed an open-ended contract with the Police Board to provide advice about sexual harassment allegations made by two police officers against the board president. The firm also signed a $17,000 contract in January 2003 to represent the police to state legislators.

Other panelists with connections to the Police Department were:

Gerald Carlson, a partner at the accounting firm KPMG. His firm was paid more than $327,000 to conduct accounting audits for the Police Department from 1999 through 2004.

Scott H. Decker, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. The Police Department has paid Decker and UMSL researchers about $22,500 in the past five years to analyze traffic stops for racial profiling, the department's disciplinary practices and the department's rape statistics.

James F. Gilsinan, dean of the School of Public Service at St. Louis University. He had been paid $10,000 in the past two years to analyze the police work force by gender and race, to run promotional examinations and to audit 2004 radio calls.

Barbara Wright, executive director of planning and technology for the Police Department.

Maj. Paul Nocchiero, a special assistant to Mokwa.

The final panelist was Tripp Frohlichstein, president of MediaMasters Inc., which teaches public relations tactics.

No members of the panel were paid for their work. But the Police Board immediately awarded contracts for thousands of dollars to follow up on the panel's findings.

Decker and UMSL researchers were paid $7,500 in June to analyze why St. Louis police reported so few rapes compared to other cities its size.

St. Louis University was paid $24,192 for Gilsinan and an associate to audit calls for police in 2004, to determine whether officers were accurately reporting crimes.

Gilsinan acknowledged that it might appear to be a conflict of interest for a police contractor to serve on what the Police Department billed as an "independent" panel but called it a "two-edged sword."

"In order to be effective on the panel, you probably needed people who understand the system and weren't starting from zero with how the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting works, " he said. The experience working with the police "makes for a more effective panelist."

Members of the panel interviewed recently said their work was independent. Frohlichstein said he accepted the post because of Mokwa's "high moral ground" in asking the panel to determine whether there were errors in the city's crime reporting and to suggest solutions.

"If there was any pressure, " he said, "it was to make sure we did it right."

Dowd said he was unaware that his employer, the Bryan Cave law firm, had ever represented the police, but he said it wouldn't have had any effect on his impartiality. He also said the department would have been hard-pressed to find people to serve on the board who didn't have connections to the police.

"I think that everyone in that group was determined to find out what the facts were, what had happened, what were the problems, " he said. "We identified the problems as best we could and made recommendations to the chief and the Police Board."

Mokwa was not involved in its deliberations, Dowd said.

The panel, not Ryan, made the conclusions in the report, he said.

Ryan said panel members "were absolutely committed to making sure that the report reflected their work. They wanted to make sure every word in there was right."

"Not.o.o.independent"

An expert in police accountability said an independent panel cannot include people with a stake in the department.

That's "wrong, period, " said Samuel Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

"An independent panel does not include people who have financial interest or have had financial interest, " he said. "That's not the definition of independent."

In Atlanta, the police chief recommended discipline for officers accused of keeping rape complaints out of crime statistics. Then the district attorney began a criminal investigation to see whether laws were broken. The district attorney called in an outsider to investigate because his intelligence chief was a former Atlanta police supervisor in the Sex Crimes unit.

"When the whole question was, did the police act properly, which is a question of public trust, obviously if you're going to answer that, you want the answer to be as free of any question as possible, " said Erik Friedly. He is a spokesman for Paul L. Howard Jr., the district attorney in Georgia's Fulton County.

In March, Howard chose former U.S. Attorney Richard H. Deane Jr., who was once Atlanta's top federal prosecutor, to take over the investigation.

Mokwa, too, selected a former U.S. attorney to lead the local inquiry -- one who was known for helping the government investigate itself. Dowd assisted in the investigation into the deadly 1993 FBI raid of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

From the onset, the St. Louis police panel wanted to operate outside of the public domain. It did not post any notice of its first meeting, Dec. 7. A Post-Dispatch reporter found out about it while it was in session and attended the final minutes.

When the newspaper requested access to future meetings, Jane Berman Shaw, a department lawyer, insisted the panel was exempt from the state's open-meeting law. When the newspaper threatened a suit, Shaw said the panel would provide notice of and access to the meetings, without conceding that the law applied to the panel.

Members divided into subcommittees and kept in touch by e-mail.

Mokwa's assistants kept the panel apprised of the Post-Dispatch's inquiries. When the newspaper requested copies of police records, the department copied them -- and panel member Decker reviewed them first.

After the Post-Dispatch asked his colleague, Richard Rosenfeld, to analyze St. Louis rape data, Decker notified Mokwa the study was being done.

Rosenfeld determined that statistically, St. Louis should have recorded 214 rapes in 2003. But it reported just 81 rapes to the FBI. He posted the results of his study on a Web site with a caution to other criminologists to question St. Louis rape data.

In an e-mail, Decker told Mokwa that Rosenfeld's analysis was "sound."

Police ties, contracts

Citing time constraints, the panel did not fulfill one of its original mandates -- to audit the accuracy of 2004 reports.

It saved that to be done under private contract by one of its members later.

Panel members decided there was not enough time to review a sampling of 911 calls to see whether police were correctly classifying and counting crimes. Instead, two panel members met with police personnel four days before Christmas and viewed flow charts depicting how police reports are written, approved and counted in crime statistics.

They came away convinced the police had a "process" to generate accurate crime statistics and that they were trying to fix problems that had led to errors.

On the day the panel's report was due, Ryan's version of it had the panel saying it had confidence in the 2004 crime statistics. One panelist, Carlson, the accountant for KPMG, balked.

"To say that we have reviewed the stats for accuracy at this time is not true, " he wrote to Ryan.

He suggested the report should say the panel was confident about the department's "processes" to accurately count reported crimes.

Ryan polled the rest of the panel: "The group seems to have high confidence in the accuracy of these statistics. I would like that to be straight forward, but this is your call."

Decker and Gilsinan agreed with Carlson. The final report, therefore, said the panel was confident in the department's "process" to generate accurate crime statistics. But it did not sign off on the statistics themselves.

At the Jan. 19 Police Board meeting, the attention was not on the panel's confidence in the process.

Instead, the Police Department and Mayor Francis Slay issued news releases pointing out the decrease in crime, each noting the panel's work.

Slay's press release was titled, "Dowd Report Confirms What We Already Know."

It began: "There is one question the people of our City want answered. Is this city getting safer? The answer is yes."

Working for Mokwa?

In stories published Jan. 16, the Post-Dispatch disclosed that police were undercounting crime by detailing hundreds of incidents in informal memos instead of in official crime reports that are counted in crime statistics.

The story noted that the police had not complied with the newspaper's requests to copy memos and provide a number of how many were written. The newspaper quoted a police supervisor as saying there could be as many as 3,000 memos written every year. In an e-mail to Ryan that morning, Decker called the story "a disaster." He said the 3,000 estimate was too high.

"I have not vetted this through the Chief yet, " he wrote, "but you are working for him, right?"

The next day, the Post-Dispatch reported that police classified some rapes as lesser offenses and used memos to keep others off the books.

The situation was tailor-made for panel member Frohlichstein. His company teaches executives how to spin reporters and manage public-relations crises.

In an e-mail, he advised Ryan that Dowd's remarks needed to emphasize "the same kind of thing that I lead the exec summary with -- we are doing the right thing for the entire community. He should start with this, end with this and work it into the middle too -- as many times as possible."

Ryan e-mailed the final draft of the report to the panel on Jan. 18. She said panel member Nocchiero, Mokwa's special assistant, needed the final copy by the afternoon. Any more revisions after that should be sent to him, she said.

She added a word of caution: "Please do not bring any papers or draft reports with you to the meeting tomorrow. Anything you bring is subjected to the Sunshine (freedom-of-information law) request. We will have copies of these reports for you in the morning.

"Thanks for your assistance with this, " she concluded. "I hope it reflects your thoughts and comments appropriately."

Days later, Frohlichstein wrote to congratulate the team.

"From what I saw and read, it looks like you all did well, " he said. "TV carried more accurate versions of the report but the Post wasn't too bad. Nice work and thanks for letting me be a small part of your efforts."

After the Police Board meeting on Jan. 19, Decker returned to his e-mail.

"So the first story out of the box, while hardly laudatory it (is) not extremely critical, " Decker wrote to Mokwa and others. "Does it make sense to consider having the chief write an Op-Ed piece to the American, Belleville News-Democrat and the Post detailing what was found and what his commitment to the city is?

"I still think that the award won by the Sex Crimes Division needs to be better publicized. Again, it was a pleasure to work with all of you."

Nocchiero, Mokwa's special assistant, replied.

"We're thinking about the Op-Ed. I'll let you know."

He concluded: "Thanks for everything today."