If it's successful, a lawsuit filed against the New York Police Department yesterday by The New York Times would make more information about crime available to the public. The Times says there is "a pattern and practice by which the police avoided providing material that the State Freedom of Information Law said must be released."
Two of the requests made by The Times are of particular interest--the NYPD's crime incident reports and hate crimes databases:
One example of the department’s reluctance to give out data involved statistics for minor crimes — offenses like misdemeanor thefts and assaults, marijuana possession and sex offenses other than rape. The department acknowledged last month that it had not forwarded the data to the state since 2002. It was one of only two police agencies in the state that had not done so.
Because those statistics for minor crimes are withheld, this blog's posts about reported crimes only include felonies.
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