POISONED POLICE PR STATS

I have long believed that police agencies would be far better off if they did not release their crime statistics to the public. More often than not, those releases turn out to be poisoned police PR stats.
　
Law Enforcement agencies depend on public support to help them get adequate funding. A favorite PR tactic is to release crime statistics showing what a wonderful job your local police are doing. That lends itself to ‘cooking the books’ by manipulating those statistics in a favorable light. Not too long ago, the Houston Police Department got caught manipulating their crime statistics in order to ‘reduce’ the city’s murder rate by classifying several homicides - in which the victims were shot multiple times - as suicides.
　
And when it comes to the annual national crime statistics released by the FBI, even those are suspect. Why? Because the FBI compiles those statistics from the crime reports submitted to it by local police agencies. Thus the annual FBI reports will not be accurate if those local statistics were manipulated to show a decrease in crime.
　
My good friend Jay Wall, a civic-minded businessman, has invested a good amount of time and his own money in a crusade to get the Houston Police Department to adopt the CompStat program. What is the CompStat program you ask. Here is a brief description from the Free Dictionary:
　
__CompStat originated in the New York City Police Department in 1994, under leadership of Police Commissioner William Bratton and his Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple. It is a multilayered dynamic approach to crime reduction, quality of life improvement and personnel and resource management. CompStat employs Geographic Information Systems and was intended to map crime and identify problems. In weekly meetings, ranking NYPD executives meet with local precinct commanders from one of the eight patrol boroughs in New York City to discuss the problems. They devise strategies and tactics to solve problems, reduce crime, and ultimately improve quality of life in their assigned area. The system is also in use in other major metropolitan cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore actually calls their system Citistat.

HPD, Houston’s former mayor and the current mayor have been adamant in refusing to adopt a program devised by New Yorkers despite the fact that CompStat has been adopted by several major cities and touted as an extremely successful crime fighting tool. But now it seems that CompStat may not be all it's cracked up to be - at least not at NYPD. CompStat is really a good program that NYPD has turned on its head and there is no reason to believe that Los Angeles and other cities haven’t done likewise.

Yesterday's PoliceOne.com ran a long Associated Press story on whistleblower Adrian Schoolcraft, a former NYPD cop. Here is an excerpt concerning the vaunted CompStat program:
　
Eight years ago, when Schoolcraft joined the NYPD, it was enjoying a decade-long decline in serious crime that made it the envy of departments across the country. Murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts together had fallen more than 60 percent since 1993, a trend that continues today.
　
Part of the formula for success has been CompStat — a program to squash spikes in crimes, petty and otherwise, before they get out of control. Patterns are tracked by computer. Patrols are deployed based on where and when criminals are most active. Precinct commanders are judged mercilessly on the results at CompStat meetings at police headquarters.
　
Critics say the strict accountability has created the temptation to record felonies as misdemeanors — or sometimes not to record them at all. In recent years, a handful of commanders have been demoted or transferred amid allegations of cooking the books.
　
"The years of crime going down has put incredible pressure on everyone in the NYPD," said criminologist Eli Silverman. "The police department is fighting its own success."
　
The NYPD stands by its numbers, saying the instances of manipulating stats are minute in a city where more than 2,000 serious crimes are reported each week. A special unit regularly audits the figures to protect accuracy.
　
But officers insist the fudging exists. Silverman and a fellow researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, John Eterno, recently published a study based on 491 surveys of former NYPD captains that said they felt pressure to downgrade crimes, put off reports, anything to keep the stats down.
　
Silverman believes CompStat is a good idea turned on its head.
　
"You need accountability, and you need timely intelligence," he said. "But now it's become all about the numbers. You just have to produce. Numbers are the bottom line — where it should be good policing."