Last week I read ‘The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation’, a new book by John Eterno and Eli Silverman. Professors Eterno and Silverman really made their case. The only problem I see is that they are up against the multimillion dollar propaganda machine of NY Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD.
Here is an article from The CHIEF on their book:
SAY NYPD NUMBERS GAME OVERWHELMS CRIME-FIGHTING
Authors say the increasing pressure on commanders to produce improved statistics has led to over-enforcement, particularly in the minority community, while at the other extreme muddying crime patterns through a downgrade of certain offenses so that in one case, a man was able to commit seven rapes before being caught because previous complaints were reduced to trespassing
By Mark Toor
The CHIEF
February 28, 2012
When Compstat is good, it is very, very good for the NYPD. But when it goes bad, it is horrid, encouraging falsification of crime stats, wrecking morale, poisoning relationships between bosses and subordinates, and pulling the department’s entire mission out of whack, according to a new book.
Two policing experts, John A. Eterno, a retired NYPD Captain who teaches criminal justice at Molloy College, and Eli B. Silverman, a Professor Emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has studied police departments around the world, outlined their findings in “The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation,” just published by CRC Press.
A WAY TO GAIN CONTROL
Compstat got its start in the Giuliani administration under Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, who blew into the NYPD in 1994 like a hurricane and was blown out two years later when he began to outshine his boss on the publicity front. Mr. Bratton, who previously ran the old Transit Police Department, was new to the NYPD, and Compstat was, as much as anything else, a way for him to get top commanders into a room and under his influence. It was also a way to focus the department on fighting crime.
At its simplest, Compstat is a way of making bosses accountable for combating crime in the areas they command. It has four principles: accurate and timely intelligence, effective tactics, rapid deployment, and relentless follow-up. When it works properly, commanders can identify, say, a burglary spike in a neighborhood, come up with a plan to end it and then send in the troops. The program has been copied by police departments around the country.
Unfortunately, write Mr. Eterno and Mr. Silverman, Compstat in the NYPD has gone awry. “While we fully support Compstat, it has well-developed side effects that can be harmful and even malignant,” they write. “...Compstat has morphed into a numbers game over the years.” An increasingly heavy emphasis has developed on summons, arrest and stop-and-frisk numbers “to demonstrate an appearance of heightened police activity linked to successful crime-fighting. Numbers, sometimes any numbers, rule the day.”
QUESTIONABLE TACTICS AND GOALS
Originally developed with the goal of allowing commanders to address crime creatively, the authors write, Compstat now forces the entire city into the same questionable tactics aimed at the same questionable goals: constant drops in crime (or at least the seven FBI index crimes counted for Compstat) and constant increases in summonses, arrests and other evidence of activity.
Officers are evaluated on how many summonses they write rather than the quality of their interactions with citizens or their problem-solving skills. Bosses telephone complainants not to solve the crime but to elicit information that will allow them to downgrade it to a lower classification. Officers responding to calls refuse to take complaints, and lower-level supervisors downgrade them—even rapes.
In Manhattan ’s 33rd Precinct, officers arrested a man seen pushing a woman into an apartment. The man told Det. Harold Hernandez that he had committed six rapes. Searching the complaint files, Detective Hernandez found that all the rape reports had been classified as lesser crimes, mostly forcible trespass. “Had the reports been properly taken,” the authors write, “a pattern could have been developed and a rapist stopped before he struck seven times.”
BULLYING FROM THE TOP
The importance of what the NYPD considers good numbers is reinforced at Compstat sessions by senior commanders who browbeat subordinates who don’t have them. One retired boss told the authors, “Compstat equals embarrassment in front of peers.” Another said, “People’s careers are made or broken at the podium.” They quote one visiting law-enforcement commander who had observed a Compstat meeting: “I don’t know how they could treat their own people like this.”
The result? “Unfortunately, actual crime has become a secondary issue,” the authors write. “As long as the numbers of crime reports appear to be decreasing, the upper echelon is kept satiated. Officers are keenly aware that they somehow have to keep those numbers down so the commander will not be exposed to the wrath of the high-ranking officials running Compstat meetings.”
The demand for numbers results in situations in which summonses are written in minority neighborhoods that the authors imply might not be given in well-off white areas. Summonses for women eating doughnuts in a park. Summonses for men playing chess near a playground. Police stopped an elderly couple in Queens for not wearing seat belts, then forced the man to walk home in the freezing cold to get identification. Shortly after he returned to the car, he died of a heart attack. “This lack of discretion is quite simply lunacy,” the authors write.
TURNED UP THE PRESSURE
With the help of the Captains Endowment Association, Mr. Eterno and Mr. Silverman conducted a survey in 2008 of hundreds of retired officers at the rank of Captain and above. Asked to rate pressure to show a decrease in index crimes on a scale of 1 to 10, commanders who worked in the pre-Compstat era gave an average rating of 5.7; those who worked under Compstat, 8.3.
Compstat-era commanders said there was less pressure to report crime statistics accurately. Three-quarters of the respondents said crime reports were changed in a way that was unethical.
When the survey, which is prominently featured in the book, was first publicized, the Bloomberg administration landed on the authors with both feet. Mayor Bloomberg derided the study as union-funded (in fact, it was paid for by Molloy College ), and a police official theorized that the Captains were remembering the same few incidents. Mr. Eterno and Mr. Silverman were pilloried as enemies of the Police Department. (They say they are enemies only of bad policing.)
STOP-AND-FRISK STATS 'ILLOGICAL'
On the ever-rising stop-and-frisk statistics, the authors say: “The NYPD has placed itself in a completely illogical position. Based on their official statistics, crime is down tremendously...Assuming their argument about crime is true, how can they possibly be finding suspects and lawfully stopping them on every corner?”
Mr. Eterno and Mr. Silverman recommend the use of integrity testing to cut down on falsification of crime numbers. An undercover officer, they write, can pretend to be a rape victim and the report—if any—followed through the system. Beyond this, they write, cultural change is necessary. Compstat commanders must stop bullying precinct commanders and work with them in developing specific approaches for problems in specific communities. If the department doesn’t change, they say, it should be investigated by a body with subpoena power, like the Knapp and Mollen commissions.
“Originally a revolutionary management system,” they write, “we are convinced that Compstat at the NYPD needs to regain its initial creativity.”
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