Adrian Schoolcraft (NYPD)
What’s so interesting about the recent wave of
anti-police demonstrations is how they run so completely counter to the prevailing
reality.
In the early 1990s a New York City Housing Police
Lieutenant (Jack Maple) caught Housing Police boss, Bill Bratton’s attention
with a program centered around the recording and tracking of various crimes committed,
so as to be able to target police resources accordingly.
When the next Mayor, Rudy Giuliani took office, he
moved Bratton from Housing Police Boss to NYPD
Commissioner and Maple’s program, known as CompStat
took hold in New York City and eventually spread to many large police
departments around the country.
However,
CompStat was NOT immune to problems, especially the primary problem of human
nature.
The
recordings of NYPD cops like Adrian
Schoolcraft in Brooklyn and in the Bronx show that CompStat, a program initially
designed to track crime rates across a city in order to better allocate
resources and target enforcement, morphed into a numbers game that required
BOTH ever increasing numbers of summonses and minor crime arrests AND at the SAME
time ever decreasing numbers of major crimes.
Those very SAME
flaws that surfaced in New York City, also surfaced in other cities across the
country as well. Ironically enough, the problem with policing under CompStat has
NOT been “over-policing,” but actually UNDER-policing...at least
under-policing, under-reporting of more serious, or major crimes.
In such cities,
major crime victims are often victimized again by the police, seeking to
downgrade their complaints to misdemeanors or less. That often turns
law-abiding productive citizens against the police, while at the same time, the
focus on an ever increasing number of summonsable offenses and minor crimes
(public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, etc.) alienated the predominantly younger
population targeted for these offenses, leaving the police, as they say, “fresh
out of friends.”
Adding
to CompStat’s woes is the fact that Stephen
Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and others have documented an equivalent
reduction in crime rates even in cities that DIDN’T use CompStat.
A
great book chronicling the Adrian Schoolcraft tapes (he recorded thousands of
hours of roll calls and instructions by police superiors on downgrading major
crimes and was actually whisked off to a Queens Mental Hospital, by NYPD Brass,
over this) is a book called The NYPD Tapes by Graham
A. Rayman (http://www.amazon.com/NYPD-Tapes-Shocking-Cover-ups-Courage/dp/0230342272/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421866392&sr=8-1&keywords=The+NYPD+Tapes).
The tragedy here is that the numbers that SHOULD’VE been used
to target crimes and allocate resources, became a veritable “points system,”
for promotion, which encouraged outright manipulation of the numbers.
No comments:
Post a Comment