CompStat originated in the New York City Police Department in 1994, under the leadership of Police Commissioner William Bratton and Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple. Compstat is the name given to the NYPD's accountability process. It is a management philosophy or organizational management tool for police departments. CompStat employs Geographic Information Systems that map crime and identify problems, and is designed to reduce crime, improve the quality of life in the community, and manage personnel and resource deployments.
Jay Wall, a civic minded Houston real estate broker, together with two other concerned businessmen, authored an op-ed piece in the Houston Chonicle about CompStat which advocated the adoption of that program by the Houston Police Department. Wall, who is not connected with CompStat in any way, has addressed numerous civic organizations to promote its adoption by HPD. His efforts even got the backing of the Houston Police Officers Union. Unfortunately though, Mayor Bill White and his puppet police chief, Harold Hurtt, have refused to adopt CompStat, asserting that HPD already used a similar program.
CompStat has been successfully adopted by Los Angeles and many other jurisdictions with significant crime reduction results, something Houston has not been able to achieve. In every city, the adoption of CompStat has led to the ouster of management personnel, and that is probably the real reason White has opposed its adoption by HPD. It is no secret that Mayor White intends to run for Governor of Texas and he is not going to rock the boat by adopting a program which will reveal that his police department has been infested with incompetent management.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute which publishes the journal. She has written a comprehensive article on the spread of CompStat from NYPD to other police agencies. Here is Part 1 of Mac Donald's article, "The NYPD Diaspora," which was published in the Summer 2008 edition of the City Journal:
Former New York cops bring cutting-edge, effective policing to beleaguered communities.
Since the late 1990s, more than 18 police commanders have left the New York City police department to run their own agencies elsewhere. This unprecedented migration has spread the Compstat revolution—the data-driven transformation of policing begun under New York police commissioner William Bratton in 1994—across the nation. Some of the transplants are well-known: Bratton himself now heads the Los Angeles Police Department; and his former first deputy, John Timoney, has led both the Miami and the Philadelphia forces. But the diaspora also includes lesser-known young Turks who rose quickly through the NYPD’s ranks during the paradigm-shattering 1990s. Now, as chiefs in their own right, they’re proving the efficacy of analytic, accountable policing in agencies wholly dissimilar from New York’s—in one case, achieving success beyond anything seen in Gotham or elsewhere.
José Cordero once led precincts in the Bronx and in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, and eventually he served as New York’s first citywide gang strategist. Like other members of the diaspora, he describes the 1990s NYPD as a life-changing experience: "It was an incredibly resourceful, competitive environment. The wave of captains I was privileged to serve with fed off of each other’s experiments." In 2002, he took the helm of the Newton, Massachusetts, police department, bringing crime in that already safe city down to its lowest point in over 30 years.
Then he moved to a very different city. East Orange, New Jersey, has 70,000 citizens by official counts, about 95 percent of them black, and deep pockets of poverty. Crime there—much of it violent—had started skyrocketing in 1999, reaching a per-capita rate in 2003 that was 14 times that of New York City and five times that of Detroit. East Orange’s mayor recruited Cordero to quell the violence; Cordero started work in 2004. The results were astonishing. By the end of 2007, major felonies had dropped 68 percent, and homicides 67 percent, from their 2003 high—possibly a national record. (By comparison, from 1993, the year before Bratton arrived in New York City, through 1997, major felonies in New York dropped 41 percent and homicides 60 percent.) East Orange’s remarkable experience should give pause to criminologists, who too often ascribe crime drops to anything but policing reforms.
If the true test of a leader is his ability to imbue an organization with his vision, Cordero has leadership skills in spades. Intelligence-driven policing, as he calls the Compstat principles, is now in the department’s bloodstream, as is the still-iconoclastic belief that the police can actually lower crime. Compstat refers both to the weekly crime-analysis meetings that Bratton pioneered in 1994 to grill precinct leaders about crime on their watch and, more broadly, to the crime-fighting principles that underlay those meetings: relentless gathering of information, constant evaluation of tactics, and a mechanism for holding commanders accountable for public safety. East Orange commanders now focus obsessively on their mission and revel in coming up with new ways to make the city inhospitable to criminals.
The transformation that Cordero effected in the East Orange department mirrored the one he had lived through as a young NYPD captain at the dawn of Compstat. "All we had done up to that point was put people in jail, and it hadn’t made a difference," recalls the 52-year-old Bronx native. "The new concept was, know everything you possibly can about crime. What I took away from that period was that by challenging yourself continually to know what you don’t know, you can produce big results."
So Cordero tasked his new team to find out everything it could about who was shooting whom. He combined East Orange’s gang and narcotics squads to maximize information-sharing between drug and gang detectives, since the narcotics trade and gang violence entwine so closely. Eventually, the department targeted the most violent drug dealers and drove them out of business. Word got out on the street that if you engaged in a shooting, not only were you going to do time—possibly in the federal slammer—but your whole criminal enterprise would be shut down.
Weekly Compstat meetings are at the core of the East Orange crime rout, but Cordero, like his expatriate peers, borrows freely from the entire gamut of crime-busting techniques developed in New York. He put East Orange’s two most dangerous streets under 24-hour lockdown for six months while the police bore down on the dealers, a strategy that his NYPD colleague (and now Newark top cop) Garry McCarthy had successfully pioneered in Washington Heights. Today, those two streets are clean and orderly.
Ronald Borgo exemplifies the East Orange Police Department’s transformation. He exudes enthusiasm as he sits at a computer terminal, putting the turbocharged crime-analysis computer program that Cordero designed through its paces. "I was ready to move on until I saw what Director Cordero brought on board," says the barrel-chested 27-year veteran of the department, who is soon to be confirmed as chief (a position underneath director). "I’m embarrassed to say that in 2000, we didn’t know how to connect the dots. We were just reacting to crime. The director gave us the knowledge and the confidence to actually fight it."
However much Cordero and Borgo stress that it is managerial and philosophical change, not fancy gadgets, that has driven crime down, it’s hard not to be wonderstruck by that computer program—"Compstat on steroids," as Cordero calls it. Its "crime dashboard" graphically presents layer upon layer of real-time crime and policing information, updated every 30 seconds. Commanders can check whether any sector of the city is meeting its daily, weekly, and monthly crime-reduction targets, and how the sector’s record stacks up against last year’s numbers. They can instantly pull up a history of the crimes committed at any location, along with every police response to those crimes, in order to evaluate what strategies have or have not succeeded there in the past. Users can activate the city’s public cameras to display crime hot spots.
And most unusually, users can observe how every patrol car is deployed at that moment and what it is doing to prevent crime, in what the department calls "directed patrol." Directed patrol is really nothing more than what good beat cops used to do as a matter of course, before the 911 radio car swallowed their jobs: rather than simply cruising around town waiting for trouble to happen, an officer is supposed to use his time to preempt crimes, ideally by getting out of his car. Cops might walk up a housing project’s stairwell to check for drug dealers, say, or pass out flyers about a robbery spree at a mini-mall. "You’d be surprised what people will tell you when you’re out of your car that they won’t call the department about," says Borgo—such as that a neighboring apartment is likely dealing drugs. Institutionalizing the concept of directed patrol represents a "huge organizational change in how officers work on the street," says Lieutenant Chris Anagnostis. "The new model is: when a cop is not answering a radio call, he should be back in his zone engaged in proactive policing."
The real-time display of patrol activity allows managers to monitor deployment patterns as well as officer initiative. "If a citizen reports a problem, and an officer doesn’t see and act on it, then it becomes clear to me that he is not enthusiastic about his job," says Cordero, who dismisses the suggestion that the oversight may feel Orwellian to a street cop. "We’re not looking to see if an officer is having a cup of coffee. We’re in the business of protecting people; any good cop will see the value of that. For those that don’t, I have a word for them: ‘Tough. Find another line of work.’ "
The patrol-car locator system did produce a backlash. Some officers broke their cars’ antennae or yanked out the requisite communication wires. Cordero remained unfazed: "There’s 70,000 people I care about; I don’t fear disgruntled cops." He seems to have won the battle—officers now treat the vehicle locators as a matter of course. And self-initiated activity has gone way up, reports Borgo. "In 2004, we did 6,389 directed patrols and we thought we were working. In 2007, we did almost half a million," he says. "The technology is one thing, but these cops, my cops, are working. I’m so proud of these cops."
After the department introduced the crime dashboard in 2005, crime plummeted 26 percent in one year. Currently, only supervisors at headquarters and in the field have access to the dashboard, but eventually, every officer on the beat will have a simplified version in his car, so that he can monitor crime in the city in real time and see how his colleagues are responding.
The crime dashboard was just the start of East Orange’s technology boom, which has cost about $1.5 million, paid for with federal and state grants and criminal forfeiture money. On the two streets that had been locked down, the department gave residents computer programs enabling them to report suspicious conditions by pointing their mouses at street photos. Community patrol officers have "virtual directed patrol" screens in their cars that let them watch two places simultaneously: they can park at a drug corner to deter dealing, for instance, while calling up camera shots of other high-crime locales throughout the city. Back at the station house, a detective rides the same public camera system, zooming in on a license plate, say, to see if a car is stolen or if its driver is wanted on an outstanding warrant. Borgo is even building a room in the reception area with 42 large screens that will display live shots from all over the city—a public display of the department’s surveillance capacities, which criminals already falsely believe are all-encompassing. "And I’m going to get civilians to monitor them: they see as well as people in uniform," he adds slyly.
Gunshot-detection sensors at various locations alert headquarters immediately when a gun gets discharged outdoors. Cameras then take pictures around the source of the shot, with an emphasis on roads and nearby arteries leaving the city, since in 70 percent of East Orange shootings, someone zooms off afterward in a car. The department also plans to introduce license-recognition technology that will automatically tell the police when a stolen car has entered the city.
(Continued in Part 2)
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