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?
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