her police departments across the United States, and the CompStat approach has been credited with improving police work in many cities. In New York City itself, much of the public believes that crime is down, and that the city has become a safer and more pleasant place to live. Task to be completed after reading the paragraph. 1. Draw a flow chart of the functioning of the COMP STAT discussed in th

Please read the case and answer the following questions. CompStat (short for COMPuter STATistics or COMParative STATistics) originated in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in 1994 when William Bratton was police commissioner. CompStat is a comprehensive, city-wide database that records all reported crimes or complaints, arrests, and summonses issued in each of the city’s 76 precincts. City officials had previously believed that crime could not be prevented by better information and analytical tools but instead by using more foot patrols in neighborhoods along with the concept of “community policing” in which efforts were made to strengthen the involvement of community groups. In contrast, Bratton and Rudy Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City, believed that. police could be more effective in reducing crime if operational decisions took place at the precinct level and if decision makers had better information. Precinct commanders were in a better position than police headquarters to understand the specific needs of the communities they served and to direct the work of the 200 to 400 police officers they managed. Comp Stat gave precinct commanders more authority and responsibility, but also more accountability. At weekly meetings, representatives from eachof the NYPD’s precincts, service areas, and transit districts are put on the “hot seat” at police. headquarters and required to provide a statistical summary of the week’s crime complaint, arrest, and summons activity, as well as significant cases, crime patterns, and police activities. Commanders. must explain what has been done to reduce crime. in the districts under their command, and if crime.has gone up, they must explain why. Commanders are held directly accountable for reducing crime in. their area of command. In the past, they were evaluated primarily on the basis of their administrative. skills, such as staying within budget and deploying resources efficiently. The data these commanders provide, including specific times and locations of crimes and. enforcement activities, are forwarded to the NYPD’s CompStat Unit where they are loaded into a city-wide database. The system analyzes the data and produces a weekly CompStat report on crime complaint and arrest activity at the precinct, patrol borough, and city wide levels. The data are summarized by week, prior 30 days, and year-to-date for comparison with the previous year’s activity and for establishing trends. The CompStat Unit also issues weekly commander profile reports to measure the performance of precinct commanders. The weekly commander profile reports include information on the commander’s date of appointment, years in rank, education and specialized training, most recent performance evaluation rating, the units that person previously commanded, the amount of overtime generated by police under that commander, absence rates, community demographics, and civilian complaints. Using MapInfo geographic information system. (GIS) software, the CompStat data can be displayed on maps showing crime and arrest locations, crime “hot spots,” and other relevant information. Comparative charts, tables, and graphs can also be projected simultaneously. These visual presentations help precinct commanders and members of the NYPD’s executive staff to quickly identify patterns and trends. Depending on the intelligence gleaned from the system, police chiefs and captains develop a targeted strategy for fighting crime, such as dispatching more foot patrols to high-crime neighborhoods, or issuing warnings to the public when a particular model of vehicle is susceptible to theft. During Bratton’s 27-month tenure, serious crime in New York dropped by 25 percent and homicides went down by 44 percent. Crime in New York City has dropped by 69 percent in the last 12 years. Skeptics do not believe that CompStat was responsible for these results. They point to the decline in the number of young, poor men, an improved economy, programs that reduced welfare rolls while giving poor people access to better housing, increasing the size of the NYC police force, and giving precinct commanders more decision-making responsibility and accountability. Nevertheless, Bratton, convinced that CompStat was the catalyst for New York’s drop in crime, implemented the system in Los Angeles to further prove its worth. Since the introduction of CompStat, combined violent and property crimes in Los Angeles dropped for six consecutive years. Yet the ratio of police officers to residents is only half that of New York and Chicago. CompStat has 482 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age also been adopted in Philadelphia, Austin, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Vancouver, British Columbia. Skeptics point out that crime has fallen in all urban areas in the United States since 1990 regardless of whether the cities used CompStat. In fact, a critical study of CompStat by the Police Foundation found that CompStat encouraged police to be only reactive rather than pro-active in fighting crime. Sending police to where crime has become a problem is, in other words, too late. CompStat encouraged what the Police Foundation called “whack-a-mole” theory of policing, similar to the game played in amusement parks. Rather than change police departments into nimble crime fighters, the Foundation found that a database had been attached to traditional organizations, which themselves remained unchanged. Because of the emphasis placed on reducing crime and because of the newfound importance of crime statistics to officers’ careers, CompStat has created pressure on some precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics to produce favorable results. Officers must continue to improve their crime statistics, despite shrinking budgets and dwindling numbers of officers. A study conducted in 2009 via a questionnaire given to 1,200 retired police captains and more senior officers concluded that nearly a third of respondents were aware of unethical manipulation of crime data. More than 100 survey respondents said that intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics. For example, officers were known to check catalogs, eBay, and other sites for items similar to those reported stolen, looking for lower prices they could use to reduce the values of the stolen goods for record-keeping purposes. Grand larceny, a felony, is considered to be theft of goods valued at $1,000 or more, whereas theft of goods valued at less than $1,000 is only a misdemeanor. Using this method, precincts could reduce the number of felony thefts, considered an “index crime” and tracked by CompStat. Surveys and anecdotal evidence also indicated a lack of receptiveness on the part of police in some areas, possibly motivated by a desire to reduce the number of crime incidents reported. Some survey respondents stated that precinct commanders or aides dispatched to crime scenes sometimes tried to persuade victims not to file complaints or urged them to change their accounts of what happened in ways that could downgrade offenses to lesser crimes. Previous studies of CompStat encountered an unwillingness by the NYPD to disclose their data reporting methods. A professor performing a study that ultimately praised CompStat’s influence on crime in New York City was given full access to NYPD crime data, but the NYPD did not cooperate with the Commission to Combat Police Corruption (CCPC), an independent board that monitors police corruption. The commission sought subpoena power to demand the NYPD turn over its data and data collection procedures to uncover potential wrong doing by the police. Unfortunately, the commission was denied access to this data after strong police department opposition. On the other hand, versions of CompStat have been adopted by hundreds of other police departments across the United States, and the CompStat approach has been credited with improving police work in many cities. In New York City itself, much of the public believes that crime is down, and that the city has become a safer and more pleasant place to live. Task to be completed after reading the paragraph. 1. Draw a flow chart of the functioning of the COMP STAT discussed in the study. –