CompStat

CompStat (also written COMPSTAT) is a police management system created by the New York City Police Department in 1994 with assistance from the New York City Police Foundation. Today, variations of the system are used in police departments worldwide. Under CompStat, the police department keeps a daily-updated digital record of crimes reported and in weekly meetings the department's leadership gathers to review trends in the data. During its early years, it was credited with decreased crime rates in NYC, though scholars are divided on whether it played a role. It has also been criticized in NYC for leading to data manipulation and increased stop-and-frisk searches.

Origins

CompStat (in NYPD it is said to be short for "compare stats", but in LAPD it is said to be short for “computer statistics”) is a management system created in April 1994 by Bill Bratton and Jack Maple, whom Bratton met while he was chief of the New York City Transit Police and later hired as the NYPD's top anti-crime specialist when he became Police Commissioner in 1993. CompStat began as weekly meetings at One Police Plaza where officers were randomly selected from precincts and quizzed about crime trends in their districts and how to respond.

Maple drafted junior staffer John Yohe to modify an existing program (known as "compare stats", and that name became the basis for the CompStat name they also acquired and gifted the department the first CompStat system.

The weekly CompStat sessions were initially open to the public and commanders would be denigrated by management if they had failed; three-quarters were dismissed over 18 months for failing to bring the numbers down. At the same time, civilian complaints against the NYPD increased. In 2010 NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft released recordings of his superiors urging him to manipulate data: his captain demanded an increase in summonses issued under threat of retaliation. In 2014 Justice Quarterly published an article stating that there was statistical evidence of the NYPD manipulating CompStat data. A 2021 study found that CompStat led to an increase in minor arrests but no impact on serious crime and led police to engage in data manipulation. In Floyd v. City of New York (2013), Judge Scheindlin ruled that CompStat led to pressure to conduct more stop-and-frisk searches without review of their constitutionality and "resulted in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of blacks and Hispanics". The program has also been adopted as an all-purpose management technique; in 2010 Mayor Bloomberg had every city service subjected to a CompStat-like evaluation. was shown to be a wiz at using the system, which proved invaluable to the success of Washington, D.C. Police Chief Jack Mannion and to the department, and which contributed to her promotion from an obscure position located in an out-of-the-way office to Director of Administrative Services.

The Law and Order: SVU episode "Limitations" features a NYPD CompStat meeting at One Police Plaza.
The system is shown in use in The Wire on HBO, though in the show it is referred to as "ComStat". This was accurate to the real world Baltimore Police Department, however, after the show had concluded, a similar system known as "CitiStat" replaced it. and "The Crime Machine Part II".

Origins

See also

References

Further reading