Why don't the UK police use Compstat?

Sorry for the lack of blogging recently. A combination of in-laws and deadlines have got in the way.

During dinner with some very illustrious ex-NYPD cops the other night, one of them asked me whether police in the UK had ever experimented with using Compstat?

For those not versed in the vagaries of police performance management, Compstat (which stands for computer comparative statistics) refers to a management tool pioneered by the NYPD under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Commissioner Bill Bratton during the 1990s. The system is very simple: ‘crime maps’ are used to track when, where and what types of crimes are occurring within a small geographical area. In weekly meetings, those maps are then used by senior NYPD personnel to hold local precinct commanders to account for crimes in their borough and to plan officer deployment accordingly.

The system has long been credited with being a major contributor to the dramatic fall in crime in NYC from the mid 1990s onwards (crime fell by over 50% in four years, almost twice the speed of the national average) and has even been dramatised by the popular HBO series, The Wire.

Although most UK police forces are now beginning to use crime mapping technology, it is mainly being done for the public’s benefit (so they can see what crimes are happening in their local area and raise the issue with their neighbourhood police team). As far as I’m aware, no police forces yet use this information as an accountability or resource deployment tool.

And as I had to admit to my colleague over dinner, I don’t know why that is, given the success it has had in the US.

Any ideas?

Putting police reform into perspective

Police protesting over pay in 2008

It is the sight that no Home Secretary ever wants to see: the police marching down Whitehall in protest against the government.

As a primary source of the state's monopoly of the use of force the police hold a uniquely powerful position in the relationship between state and citizen. That is why organised police protests tend to have a more symbolic and emotive impact than most other industrial disputes. It also explains why the structure and shape of the police workforce - and its various anomalies (for example, tenure-based, rather than performance-based pay) - have remained largely intact over the last fifty years: even the most reforming and combative Home Secretaries have tended to quail at the sight (or threat) of the police marching against them.

No doubt Teresa May and her team in the Home Office will be busy working out how best to mitigate the risk that her Police Pay Review will provoke similarly damaging protests. However, their response is likely to be tepid in comparison to the actions of the Ecuadorian police in response to President Rafael Correa's proposals to reform police pay.

Ecuadorian prosecutors have announced that a total of 57 officers are now in custody following a 'spontaneous revolt' by rebellious police who roughed up and tear gassed the president. Apparently the revolt only ended when army commandos rescued Correa in a hail of gunfire and concussion grenades at a hospital where he had been surrounded by insurrectionists...

No matter how bad things get for Teresa May and David Cameron, surely they won't get as bad as that?

The Social Network

I enjoyed David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network, on Saturday evening. This being the opening night and being Harvard, the cinema was packed to the rafters, mainly with excited students hoping to catch a glimpse of a street/ lecture theatre/ bar they knew or had been to. So it was a fun atmosphere.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the film is based on the real life events surrounding the founding of Facebook in 2003 and its creator, Mark Zuckerburg - now the world’s youngest billionaire. It also attempts to unravel the claims and counter-claims made during several costly litigation battles that followed, with Zuckerburg accused of stealing the idea behind Facebook from other students and cutting his best friend (and former business partner) out of the company.

The film avoids the usual clichés by managing to paint a more subtle picture of Zuckerburg’s character than I would have expected. Played by the brilliant Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerburg appears contradictory: simultaneously confident and insecure, a creative genius but socially inept. Partly because of this subtlety, American audiences appear divided on how to interpret him.

On the one hand, are those that see the film as a classic tale of individual ambition and drive – celebrating the cornerstones of American capitalism. To them Zuckerburg is a visionary who saw the potential power of the internet to transform social interaction and then seized the opportunity to exploit it before anyone else.

On the other, are those who see Zuckerburg, not as a hero, but as a hubristic and flawed individual who betrays his friends in order to achieve wealth and stardom. To this audience, the central irony of the film lies in the fact that the man who has transformed the experience of social communication for millions is singly incapable of forming the most basic bonds of friendship. As David Carr comments in the New York Times, “the movie could well serve as a referendum on business aggression and ambition that breaks along generational lines”.

Aside from the question of what the film says about American capitalism, it has also made me think about the extent to which Facebook has transformed our experience of social interaction. To its cheerleaders, Facebook represents the front line in a movement to democratise social interaction by strengthening networks of peers at the expense of the old established social order, which left information in the hands of elites and meant social organisation was confined to hierarchies. However, as Malcolm Gladwell has convincingly argued in this month’s New Yorker, online social networking does not and will never replace the kinds of deep interaction, commitment and yes hierarchies that were necessary to achieve change in, say, the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.

As you can see I’m no Barry Norman but I hope this will convince you to at least watch the film on DVD – I think you’ll enjoy it.