CompStat and the Panoptic Society

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/armed-with-data-fighting-more-than-crime/ May 2, 2012, 7:00 am

Armed With Data, Fighting More Than Crime

By TINA ROSENBERG

 

Government accountability systems don’t usually become global superstars, but CompStat did.  The ideas in CompStat were first developed by Jack Maple, when he was a lieutenant in the New York City Transit Police, as a way to track subway crime and more intelligently deploy transit cops.  In 1994, when William Bratton, the chief of the transit police, became chief of the New York City Police Department, he brought Maple with him as a deputy. They then applied CompStat principles throughout the city’s entire crime fighting operation.
The CompStat era coincided with a staggering decline in crime.  Between 1990 and 2011, homicide in New York City declined by 80 percent, robbery by 83 percent, burglary by 86 percent and car theft by 94 percent.  During that period crime fell everywhere in the United States, but it fell twice as much and for twice as long in New York City.
How much of this was due to CompStat is still hotly debated. One of the most careful criminologists, Franklin Zimring, gives New York City’s changes in policing (which are not limited to CompStat) credit for a significant share of the crime drop.
CompStat has now become almost as much a part of policing as the blue uniform.  A survey last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank for city police departments, found that 79 percent of medium to large police departments surveyed use some form of the CompStat model.
What is only starting to catch on, though, is the idea that CompStat isn’t just for policing.   In Baltimore, which pioneered the application of CompStat to other government business, mayors for the last decade have used a CompStat-style system to run the whole city.  CitiStat has greatly improved how the city does the meat-and-potatoes of government: picking up trash, filling potholes.   But it goes much further.  “We now Stat homelessness, we Stat domestic violence,” Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor, said in an interview.  “We’re finding more ways to use it — monitoring day-to-day progress, monitoring the pace at which we improve and push it along. We’re doing a citywide analysis of how to use CitiStat to drill down into problems that have been in existence for years.”   Baltimore has been trying for years to put in a new computerized system for emergency dispatch of ambulances and firefighters. “We’re creating a Stat process — pull all the people into the same room with independent analysts and figure out how to get rid of roadblocks,” she said.
Robert Behn, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, counts at least 19 United States cities, a couple of counties and two states — Maryland and Washington — that use CompStat for activities other than police work.  Some federal agencies are also adapting the model.
CompStat is popularly seen as a high-tech way of sticking pins in a map.   It is much more than that.  It starts with collecting data, analyzing it and presenting it in visual form — whether with pins on a map, bar graphs or other charts... cont'd