Beat Cop to Top Cop by Timoney John F.;Wolfe Tom;

Author:Timoney, John F.;Wolfe, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

8

CompStat, Crowd Control, and the “Dirty Thirty”

Look at how well we're doing, and we haven't even broken a sweat.

—JACK MAPLE

Probably the best-known—but least-understood—management technique in the Bratton administration was CompStat: a weekly crime meeting held at police headquarters by the top police brass and all of the local commanders, including specialized units such as detectives and those who dealt with narcotics, gangs, and warrants. CompStat is short for comparative statistics or computerized statistics. (I prefer comparative statistics since computers had very little to do with the initial creation and development of the crime meetings.) Many people in the Bratton administration have their own opinion on how the CompStat process first began. It all depends on where you sat at the time.

In the early months, Jack Maple, Bratton's crime czar, spent a great deal of time in my office sharing war stories, but we also had many serious conversations about how we were going to deal with crime. Jack seemed particularly frustrated with the inability to get meaningful crime statistics in a timely fashion. There was absolutely no problem in finding out what happened in certain parts of the city six months or a year earlier, but finding out what happened last month or last week was an entirely different matter. My background in OMAP was particularly helpful in explaining to Maple how the system worked. However, my explanations didn't satisfy Jack and, in fact, frustrated him even more. He thought that the Management Information Systems Division (MISD) should have the crime information readily available in a timely manner. I just laughed, having had years of experiences with MISD, whose operating credo was “It can't be done” and whose favorite answer to any question was “No.”

While timely crime information was not available at headquarters, the local borough commanders did keep up-to-date crime details regarding certain crimes that plagued their communities, most notably robberies. So the best way to get any type of updated information was to ask the borough commanders. Rather than visit each of the seven borough commanders, we decided that we would have the borough commanders come to headquarters with their staff to brief the top brass about what was going on in their individual boroughs regarding crime.

The early meetings with the borough commanders, their staffs in tow, were held in my conference room. We viewed a series of charts and maps with acetate overlays depicting certain crimes and hot spots. The initial meetings consisted of a presentation by the borough commander, with some follow-up questions asked mainly by Jack Maple and Louie Anemone. It quickly occurred to everyone present that the borough commanders could not answer certain questions since they dealt with what the detectives were doing and how many times the Narcotics Division had been in certain precincts during the course of the prior week. More people, especially from the specialized units, needed to be at these meetings. More important, we needed a bigger room. My conference room (which could comfortably accommodate forty to forty-five people) had become inadequate.

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