New York City's CompStat Program Enters a New Era
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announces CompStat 2.0 at a press conference on Tuesday. Photo by Dennis Van Tine via AP
Plenty of cities have emulated the pioneering analytics program, which is now going through a new evolution. Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks other police departments "are going to want to follow it as well."
New York City’s CompStat analytics program has long been credited with changing crime-fighting methods in police departments across the nation and around the world.
Launched in 1994 under then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who returned to that position under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014, CompStat was often trumpeted by the city as a powerful tool for reducing crime and improving quality of life.
On Tuesday, Bratton joined the mayor and Assistant Commissioner for Information Technology Jessica Tisch to announce what’s being called CompStat 2.0 . And just like with the original CompStat, de Blasio thinks cities everywhere will follow the lead of the nation’s largest city.
“... [I]magine when police forces all over the country see this new approach, they’re going to want to follow it as well,” the mayor said at a One Police Plaza press conference.
What’s new with this iteration of CompStat?
It significantly expands public access to crime data and, Bratton said, “has the ability to take all of our CompStat information that’s discussed in our CompStat meetings—all of the information, with few exceptions—that’s shared with our police officers, and now share it with both you, the media, and to the public, most importantly.”
New York magazine perused CompStat 2.0, describing it as “ Yelp for crime ”:
CompStat 2.0 takes the data into sortable public view, serving as a weirdly fun way of poking around the city. Murder is down this year by more than 30 percent, robberies by 7 percent, burglaries by 8 percent, and shootings by 25 percent; felony assaults, by contrast, are up 15 percent, perhaps boosted by the anomalous slashing spree of the past month. After 20 minutes' research, charting car thefts by the hour and murders by day of the week, I learned things about my neighborhood: Assaults go way up on the weekends, whereas thieves take it easy.
For the 77th Precinct in Brooklyn, which includes the Prospect Heights and Crown Heights neighborhoods, plotting robbery data looks like this:
While the revamped CompStat gives New York City residents a powerful tool to better understand the geography of crime in their neighborhoods, it will also help out NYPD officers.
As the Daily News reports, 36,000 smartphones tailor-made for New York City cops will be distributed throughout the force, giving officers easy access to CompStat data while on duty. Mobile fingerprinting units are being deployed, too.
“This is the single largest transformation of police communications in 50 years,” Bratton said, according to the Daily News .
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive's Route Fifty.
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