My friend was hit by a car the other night crossing the street in Brooklyn (just bruised thankfully). It was a hit and run and when the NYPD came, they did everything possible to try and dissuade him from making a report. To the point where we had a mini confrontation with the cop in order to just get him to file the paperwork. It really seemed like he had outside pressure put on him to not file.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the NYPD is fudging the numbers somehow, though homicide is a tough thing to hide in crime stats I'd imagine...
In most places a physician has to sign a death certificate for every death. The physician can either be the attending physician when the patient died during care or a medical examiner otherwise. The death certificate often has a place for "cause of death", and it's the medical examiner who officially designates a homicide. So it's hard (though certainly not impossible) for homicides to disappear from the records entirely.
He did acknowledge that while you can use various tricks to hide crime (turn robberies into larcenies), it's very difficult to massage the murder rate numbers since a state medical examiner usually classifies the death.
So how do you bring the murder rate down? They basically instilled a curfew in poorer neighborhoods, and swept the streets every night. Baltimore cops locked up something like a 100,000 people, in a city with about 650,000 people, most never charged with anything.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the NYPD is fudging the numbers somehow, though homicide is a tough thing to hide in crime stats I'd imagine...