The Malaysian government has also stopped providing crime statistics to the United Nations, according to Enrico Bisogno, the official responsible for compiling crime data at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
México Evalúa, a group that compiles crime statistics, estimates that at least 80 percent of extortion cases go unreported, and notes that some states do not even bother to track them.
The recent decrease in violence is all the more striking because last year the department recorded the fewest homicides since it began a reliable method of compiling crime statistics half a century ago.
All told, 1,162 serious crimes were reported in White Plains in 2007, about 40percentt fewer than the 1,925 murders, rapes, robberies, larcenies, car thefts and assaults reported in 1965, the first year that the city began compiling crime statistics.
But Sgt. Chris Murphy, who compiles crime statistics at the precinct, says that a better question than why shootings were up last year is "Why were they down for so long?" A few blocks north of where most of the newly arrived artists live, longtime residents refer to their neighborhood as the ghetto.
Compiling crime statistics is a multi-step process with the potential for errors or intentional distortion at various points.
Of course, the problem with the Ministry of Security taking charge of compiling crime and violence data is that there's an obvious conflict of interest.
In 2003, the Met also compiled a crime report relating to a complaint about a 1970s incident.
The sharp divergence between the Bureau of Justice Statistics' report and the FBI's data, which is compiled through crime data submitted from state agencies and police departments across the country is troubling, O'Donnell said.
To chart these numbers, the Police Department uses two computer programs; one, called Swift Justice, tracks crimes from the time they are reported, and the other compiles crime numbers that are then reported to state and federal agencies.
