Compstat

Compstat, alternatively styled COMPSTAT, ComStat, or CompStat, derives its name from computer statistics and refers to the policies, practices, systems, and organizational structures subsumed by a revolutionary police management paradigm first developed and implemented by the New York Police Department (NYPD) in 1994 during the administration of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton. The Compstat management system had an immediate and dramatic impact on the NYPD's capacity to reduce crime and improve quality of life within New York City, where overall crime (as measured by the seven major Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Index Crimes of murder, rape, robbery, burglary, felony assault, grand larceny and motor vehicle theft) declined more than 80 percent from 1993 levels. Depending upon the definitions applied, New York City was ranked as the safest big city or among the safest big cities in the United States in 2012. As a result of this success in New York, Compstat management systems and principles have been widely adopted and emulated by police and law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and around the world.

Bratton was appointed New York's police commissioner in January 1994 with the mandate to reduce crime and improve quality of life within the city. Bratton and his chief crime strategist, Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple, recognized the need to modify the agency's structure, internal communications systems, management policies, and conventional but largely ineffective approaches to crime fighting. Crime rose steadily in New York from the early 1960s through the early 1990s, and although the agency began moving away from organizational structures and policies rooted in the professional model and toward a community policing model in the early 1990s, the community policing policies and practices it employed proved only minimally effective in reducing crime and improving quality of life within the city.

Bratton and Maple recognized the compelling need to decentralize and redistribute the agency's power, authority, discretion, and accountability systems from headquarters executives to middle managers at the field command level, who were far more familiar with the dynamics of crime than were headquarters executives. Less encumbered by the decisions of a centralized bureaucracy and empowered with enhanced operational discretion, field commanders were able to respond quickly to emerging crime patterns and trends within their areas of responsibility. The Compstat paradigm operationalized the devolution of power, authority and discretion to field commanders, empowering them by increasing the scope of their authority, and discretion and by providing them with greater control over personnel and other resources, concurrently increasing those [Page 138]field commanders' accountability for the use of these resources as well as for reducing crime and improving quality of life.