Crime Rate Dropping??

According to the Tennessean, Nashville crime has fallen to its lowest level in thirty-one years.  Though I hate to be a naysayer, I wonder about the reliability of the statistics as reported.  Some of you may already be familiar with COMPSTAT, a statistics based approach to crime fighting employed famously in the fictional Baltimore Police of HBO’s The Wire.  Although I was generally a big fan of that show, I initially laughed at the two-dimensional plot-line involving the police:  A bully police chief fools the city into believing that crime is dropping by manipulating his computer program to spit out the stats he wants, all the while slashing the police budget by focusing resources on arresting street-level dealers (also called users) rather than engaging in real police work, i.e., fully funded, long ranging investigations which would  target high-level traffickers.  I thought the plot was absurd, because I thought no self-respecting city, which I know Baltimore to be, would (a) fall for such a buffoon of a police chief, or (b) give up its real police work to inflate statistics for short-term political gain.

Then I found out that the Metro Nashville Police Department had engaged the COMPSTAT program in its war on crime, which left me wondering where the similarities ended.  If you believe the Nashville Police Chief, and his press release repeated in the Tennessean, Nashville crime is low.  However, this recent New York Times article, in which retired police officers admitted that police officers, and even detectives, manipulated statistics under enormous departmental pressure, makes me question:  is crime really down?  Doesn't feel like it to me.  For a more thorough discussion of the reasons behind a more precipitous crime-rate drop, see Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not by Steven D. Levitt