Leap year crimes tallied at year's end

BY ROCCO PARASCANDOLA | rocco.parascandola@newsday.com

March 20, 2008

There's no disputing Key Food cashier Tina Negron was stabbed to death inside the East Village supermarket. The police said so, her family mourned, and just last week, the New York Police Department released a photo of her alleged killer, fellow worker and jilted boyfriend James Gonzalez, who is at large.

But the 9th Precinct murder exists in a statistical netherworld because it occurred on Leap Day -- Feb. 29 -- a day the numbers-conscious NYPD put off counting numbers.

A check of the 9th Precinct crime numbers in fact shows zero murders this year. Also not counted was the stabbing of the Key Food employee who tried to stop Gonzalez, the shooting death of a 21-year-old man in the Bronx and about 250 other felonies: rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies and stolen autos.

No need to worry, the NYPD says. The practice, in place since at least 2000, is simply a means to track crime accurately. Each week, police issue a new CompStat report, one that compares crime to the same seven dates from previous year. At year's end, police say, whatever crimes occurred on a Leap Day are added to the final tally.

"We count the numbers," says Assistant Chief Michael Collins, a department spokesman. "We just don't count them right now. Otherwise, it presents a distorted comparison. We want to see the same number of days. That's how closely we look at these numbers."

Indeed, NYPD supervisors who have attended CompStat meetings, in which police commanders are grilled about how crime is being addressed in their precincts, said the Leap Year exclusion shows how meticulous the department is about tracking and fighting crime.

Some of those sources, however, are critical of CompStat and say it's an example of a numbers obsession that sometimes gets in the way of good policing.

In Los Angeles, whose Police Commissioner Bill Bratton instituted CompStat when he ran the NYPD from 1994 to the middle of 1996, crimes occurring on Leap Day are counted that week.

"It's absolutely tallied," said Officer Ana Aguirre, a Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman. "The day is included in the stats."

To explain the typical rise in crime whenever Leap Year occurs, the LAPD simply notes in its report that the tally is based on eight days, compared to seven the previous year.

Both Nassau and Suffolk police departments say they are including the crimes that happened on Feb. 29 in the year-end statistics.

Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said what is most important is that Leap Year crimes are counted by the time the year is over.

"Unless they're excluding them from the year-end, total I suppose there's no harm done," Karmen said.

Staff writers Christine Armario and Laura Rivera contributed to this story.