Detroit Publishing Co. Beantown 1906 “Boston, Washington Street. On your left: National Fireworks”
A universal strategy of large institutions is the manipulation of their “books & records” in a positive direction – i.e. one suggesting high levels of current performance and future growth. We see this happen time and again across institutions in all sectors of developed societies, private and public. Large corporations, for example, extensively use off balance sheet vehicles riddled with leveraged products to hide their exposure to risk, or various other accounting tricks to over-state their revenues/profits and under-state their costs/liabilities.
However, this manipulative strategy is even easier to identify in the governing institutions of “democratic” nations. While the phenomenon is certainly not limited to one country (the governments of the European periphery come to mind), it is perhaps most evident and widespread in the U.S. Indeed, the structures and culture of American society can almost be defined solely in terms of data manipulation for the sake of appearances, a.k.a. “public relations” or perception management. The sheer pervasiveness and momentum of these practices has made them an integral part of what it means to be a competitive institution in America.
Beat cops and detectives in your typical American city may refer to this strategy as “juking the stats”, while Lieutenants on up would probably call it something along the lines of “criminal statistics management”. When the order comes down from the bosses at the top, the “primaries” at a crime scene could be forced to conduct their investigations and label the crimes in the least publicly embarrassing manner. If the Mayor wants to run for office in a few months on a “reduced crime rate” platform (and which mayor doesn’t?), then anything but the most obvious murders may be lightly investigated and ultimately classified as “unknown deaths” or suicides. Perhaps a few bodies near the city limits will be dumped on the neighboring county.