time be a victim of rape or attempted rape. (The actual figure is more like one in eight-but the advocates know it would take a callous person to publicly dispute their claims.) Advocates working for the cures of various tragic diseases regularly do the same. Why not? A lit- tle creative lying can draw attention, indignation, and-perhaps most important-the money and political capital to address the actual problem. Of course an expert, whether a womens health advocate or a polit- ical advisor or an advertising executive, tends to have different incen- tives than the rest of us. And an experts incentives may shift 180 degrees, depending on the situation. Consider the police. A recent audit discovered that the police in Atlanta were radically underreporting crime since the early 1990s. The practice apparently began when Atlanta was working to land the 1996 Olympics. The city needed to shed its violent image, and fast. So each year thousands of crime reports were either downgraded from violent to nonviolent or simply thrown away. (Despite these continu- ing efforts-there were more than 22,000 missing police reports in 2002 alone-Atlanta regularly ranks among the most violent Ameri- can cities.) Police in other cities, meanwhile, were spinning a different story during the 1990s. The sudden, violent appearance of crack cocaine had police departments across the country scrapping for resources. They made it known that it wasnt a fair fight: the drug dealers were armed with state-of-the-art weapons and a bottomless supply of cash. This emphasis on illicit cash proved to be a winning effort, for     nothing infuriated the law-abiding populace more than the image of the millionaire crack dealer. The media eagerly glommed on to this story, portraying crack dealing as one of the most profitable jobs in America. But if you were to have spent a little time around the housing proj-