EDITORIAL : FAULTY FIGURES INCORRECT CRIME DATA CAN NEEDLESSLY HURT STRUGGLING BUSINESSES.

THE Police Commission, at its meeting today, is scheduled to review a city study that questions the reliability of crime data reports for determining whether a business is a nuisance, deserving of punitive action by the city.

We hope the panel will heed that conclusion and assert the common-sense principle of not relying solely on crime reports to identify a problem business.

Businesses in some parts of the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere could be put at an unfair disadvantage if such crime incident statistics aren't put in context. In many cases, it's not as if the businesses encourage or even tolerate crime; it's simply because of the neighborhood where they are located.

What's more, the Police Commission study released Friday found that crime incidents aren't even counted accurately. Often they have been counted twice because of the peculiarities of the LAPD's record keeping. Numerous incidents on the street or public sidewalk were chalked up to a nearby business.

Those discrepancies perhaps could be dismissed as harmless bungles if the data merely languished in a forgotten archive. But that's not the case; the reports can be, and have been, used to decide whether the city will take action against specific businesses, including imposing burdensome requirements on them as a condition for staying open.

It is appropriate for statistics to be trotted out as one element of such decisions. But it's also important to recognize the distinction between land-use issues and law-enforcement issues.

When a business neither causes nor facilitates crime but simply is another victim of neighborhood lawbreakers, then shutting it down is both unfair and ineffective. In that case, a forced shutdown only increases commercial vacancy rates, worsens economic conditions and introduces the problem of crime displacement - moving the crime to another location, just a few doors or a few blocks away.