Paging Investigative Reporters!
Oh wait, who are we kidding?
Paging Ben Joravsky!!!
A book has been published this week that blows the lid off of the CompStat smoke-and-mirrors game. From the press release:
- CRIMINOLOGISTS EXPOSE NYPD DISTORED POLICIES, MANAGEMENT ABUSE, AND STATISTICAL MANIPULATION January 25, 2012 In the mid-1990s, the NYPD created a performance management strategy known as Compstat. It consisted of computerized data, crime analysis, and advanced crime mapping coupled with middle management accountability and crime strategy meetings with high-ranking decision makers. While initially credited with a dramatic reduction in crime, questions quickly arose as to the reliability of the data.
The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation brings together the work of two criminologists—John A. Eterno, Ph.D. Professor Molloy College and a former NYPD captain and Eli B. Silverman, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus John Jay College of Criminal Justice—who present the first in-depth empirical analysis of this management system—exposing the truth about crime statistic’s manipulation in the NYPD and the repercussions suffered by crime victims and those who blew the whistle on this corrupt practice.
This is the first comprehensive scientific analysis which exposes a contorted management system that promotes manipulation of crime numbers, arrest and summons quotas, planting of drug evidence, illegal drug arrests, excessive and illegal stop and frisks and additional questionable police practices. Providing insider insight into a system shrouded in secrecy, this volume:- Documents and analyzes a wide array of data that definitively demonstrates the range of manipulation reflected in official New York City crime statistics
- Explores how the consequences of unreliable crime statistics ripple throughout police organizations, affecting police, citizens, and victims
- Documents the widening spell of police performance management throughout the world
- Reviews current NYPD leadership approaches and offers alternatives
- Analyzes the synchronicity of the media’s and the NYPD’s responses to the authors’ findings
- Explores the implications of various theoretical approaches to Compstat
- Offers a new approach based on organizational transparency
This is not light reading by any means. The NYPD brass has been running a full-out attack on the authors, one of whom is a former NYPD captain, in an effort to undermine the findings of this book, many of which relate directly to the ongoing tribulations at our very own 35th Street HQ.
CompStat is a numbers game, plain and simple, and this book exposes much of it for the disaster it is and continues to be.
CompStat is a numbers game, plain and simple, and this book exposes much of it for the disaster it is and continues to be.