A RECENT survey of retired New York Police Department personnel strongly implies that the police’s reporting of crime statistics in New York City has been skewed for years, with precinct commanders and others downgrading crimes to make their results look better. According to the survey’s authors, criminologists John Eterno and Eli Silverman, and to spokesmen for the Captains Endowment Association, the pressures exerted by the department’s CompStat crime-tracking program forced commanders and their subordinates to manipulate statistics to protect themselves from abuse at CompStat meetings, where their results were discussed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
CompStat originated on my watch as police commissioner, from 1994 through early 1996, and I acknowledge that it was intended to be a tough system, using rigorous weekly reports to refocus commanders on combating crime. Nevertheless, I believe that very few precinct commanders would downgrade crimes under such pressure — and that there wouldn’t have been much effect on overall crime rates even if they had.
CompStat has been adopted with great success around the world. It is not merely an accountability device; it is a communications tool that keeps commanders aware of innovations in other precincts and a management development tool that enables leadership to identify their best mid-level officers.
Like any meritocracy, CompStat has its losers, but it has also helped many winners advance faster and be given more responsibility. No one ever said that policing was a pressure-free profession. New York’s current chief of department, Joe Esposito, who runs CompStat today, was a captain in Brooklyn when I was police commissioner, and he excelled at CompStat. I remember him saying, “If you run your command right, CompStat is no problem.”
The notion that there has been widespread downgrading of felony crime under CompStat is way off base. First, categories of crime that are nearly impossible to downgrade, notably homicide and auto theft, have declined much more than the categories that might be more readily manipulated. Auto thefts, which must be reported accurately because victims need crime reports to make insurance claims, are down 90 percent since 1993, the year before CompStat was inaugurated. In contrast, grand larceny, the category that can be most readily downgraded (by reducing the value of the property stolen), has declined only about 55 percent. Homicides, which generally report themselves when the body is discovered, are down about 76 percent, from 1,951 in 1993 to 471 in 2009.
Second, it is hard to imagine that continuous and citywide declines in crime, like the one New York City has experienced, could be engineered by individual commanders. Each successive commander would have to do the same for the statistics to stand — or manage the extraordinary feat of not only reducing crime further, but also accomplishing the reductions that his predecessor falsely claimed. Given that there are more than 75 precincts and CompStat has been in use for 16 years, that seems highly unlikely.
Third, there are serious questions about the thoroughness of Eterno and Silverman’s survey. Out of 491 anonymous participants, described as retired “high-ranking” Police Department personnel, 160 said they knew of downgrading. But they were not asked whether they had witnessed these downgrades or had merely heard about them. As Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne has pointed out, second- and third-hand accounts may just be the rumor mill repeating the same handful of stories. Moreover, not one respondent admitted to downgrading crime; if it were a widespread practice, one would expect that at least a handful of the 491 people surveyed would anonymously admit that they had engaged in it.
The New York Police Department has some of the finest precinct commanders and other mid-level officers of any department in this country, and I do not believe that the pressure of CompStat, or any pressure for that matter, would cause them to lose their moral compass. The Police Department’s precinct commanders, their determination and their innovations were the single most important force in cutting crime in New York City. I have a hard time understanding why the Captains Endowment is defending the findings of a study that compromises their own membership’s accomplishments by casting aspersions on both their integrity and their crime statistics.
Whatever their reasons, one thing is abundantly clear. New York City is irrefutably a far safer place than it was 16 years ago. You can’t manipulate that reality.
