Part of how NYC burnishes its crime stats; other cities?

Instructing police officers to downgrade crimes, like robberies to stolen property or rapes to misdemeanor sexual assaults, is certainly one way of doing that.

It also means you can justify having fewer police officers (hence the incredibly slow response times in this would-have-been-downgraded rape), because, well, because there's not a lot of serious crime!

That said, New York City was the metropolis that got busted, because it was a journalist who was sexually assaulted. Especially during the ongoing recession, I wonder how common this is elsewhere.