The State - News from Dec. 22, 1987

For each of the last 10 years, San Francisco’s Police Department has given federal and state authorities wrong statistics for the number of murders, the San Francisco Examiner reported. The paper also said the police reported the wrong number of murder cases solved. The paper reportedly found discrepancies between the crime statistics kept by homicide detectives and those the department reports each year to the FBI and the state attorney general. The newspaper said the city reported fewer murders for the period from 1976 to 1986 than actually occurred, and reported solving far fewer murders than were solved. Hal Waterman, a management assistant and computer expert, blamed poor record-keeping and an aberration in computer programming for the errors.