Walker Leading In Latest WI Polls

There are a couple of recent polls in Wisconsin showing Gov. Scott Walker up from 5%-8% over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.  Barrett is on his way to another loss to Walker, and he's going to spend at least some of the rest of this campaign trying to explain this:

When Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn touted the city's fourth-straight year of falling crime in February, hundreds of beatings, stabbings and child abuse cases were missing from the count, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.

More than 500 incidents since 2009 were misreported to the FBI as minor assaults and not included in the city's violent crime rate, the investigation found. That tally is based on a review of cases that resulted in charges - only about one-fifth of all reported crimes.

Yet the misreported cases found in 2011 alone are enough that Flynn would have been announcing a 1.1% increase in violent crime in February, instead of a 2.3% decline from the reported 2010 numbers, which also include errors.

The question is who was directing the police to misreport these crimes? Was it someone in the department or political pressure from the Mayor or his office? People already have enough suspicion about government statistics without having something like this come along.

I doubt an answer will be known before the June 5th election, but this will certainly complicate the remainder of Barrett's failed candidacy.