On a Friday night two years ago, a 17-year-old fired a pistol at a group of young men on the street near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; two were struck in the leg.
Nearby, Amanda Dominguez, 14, and her older half-sister, Jazmin Rodriguez, were chatting away when the shots rang out. Each suddenly felt a sharp sting.
Jazmin looked down at a hole in her cargo shorts and saw blood. She picked a sliver of metal from her wound, but dropped it, she would later recall. Her sister, Amanda, felt a burn along her shoulder, which a hospital nurse later told her was a graze wound, she said.
But the New York Police Department concluded that both women had merely received scrapes while fleeing the shooting, and did not count them as crime victims.
Read more in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/nyregion/misdemeanor-or-felony-new-scrutiny-of-how-police-reports-classify-crime-in-new-york-city.html?src=rechp