New Orleans Chief Takes Issue With Audit on Crime Reporting

A legislative audit report on dispatch data from the New Orleans Police Department says police answered some calls last year about crimes that appear not to have been properly reported to state and federal officials.

The police department, however, takes issue with some of the auditors’ methods

The audit of 1,000 incident calls for 2012 said there were 319 incidents that it appears should have been part of the Uniform Crime Report statistics, including 186 serious incidents such as burglaries or violent crimes.

Police chief Ronal Serpas said auditors used a small, selective sample of dispatch reports. Serpas outlined numerous steps the department has taken to assure accurate reporting. He said the department’s own review of over 21,000 calls about serious incidents showed an error rate of under 2 percent.