THE CRIME GAME

Can A Fancy Computer Really Cut Evil-Doing

FOR all the self-promoted sturm und drang of the media, too many in
the craft accept too much without question. They are not as immune
from conventional wisdom and urban myths as they would like to believe.

You see it often. Auditors-general reports are treated like sermons
from the mount, beyond the criticism of mere mortals. Every
aboriginal kid who went to a residential school is depicted as a
"victim" or "survivor." There is no shading in such pictures, just
black and white, good and evil.

Such is the case with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his
blink-long visit to Winnipeg recently. Most of the media, and
politicians like Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz, soaked up all the
crime-fighting claims Giuliani made at the recent city summit here.
And nary was heard a discouraging word.

And, really, who cares? A potential candidate for the U.S. presidency
comes to town, brags about his record and leaves in a cloud of dust.
No harm no foul; turn the page.

Now, however, Sam Katz is using Giuliani's claims as the basis for
public policy in Winnipeg and, again, the media are complicit in
promoting an agenda around which there are a lot of questions nobody
has bothered to ask.

While in Winnipeg, Giuliani said a key element in the decline in the
crime rate in New York in the 1990s was a management and computer
system called CompStat, promoted by himself and his police
commissioner William Bratton.

Katz was so thrilled with this revelation that he now wants the
Winnipeg Police Service to implement the system. The bottom line,
apparently, is that the system will do for Winnipeg what it
supposedly did for New York and other cities: cut the crime rate.

The question then is whether the system played a central role in
cutting crime in New York. Since the late 1990s conventional wisdom
told us that Giuliani's tough guy approach to crime and
implementation of CompStat in 1994 cut the New York crime rate by
more than 60 per cent.

Wayne Barrett, a senior editor of the Village Voice in New York and
author of the book Rudy, says what Giuliani really managed to do is
"mug the media into accepting as fact that he is the man who caused
it to happen."

In fact, crime peaked in New York, and across North America, in 1990
and there were 36 months of declines preceding the election of
Rudolph Giuliani and the implementation of CompStat.

"The only real claim that Rudy Giuliani can make to a legacy at all
is in the crime statistics," says Barrett, "and they have been
miserably manipulated."

For example, he points out that under Giuliani the rate for attempted
forced burglary dropped by a whopping 90 per cent. This seems
startling until one realizes police at one time went out to
investigate attempted burglaries, but now victims have to go to the
precinct to report them. People just don't bother.

And CompStat is very much about statistics.

The system compiles statistics on selected types of crime on a daily
basis, giving police a quick view of where crime is occurring. In
most departments these statistics are then used by management to hold
district commanders accountable for taking action in their areas of
the city. While the statistical element of CompStat gets all the
publicity, it is the accountability aspect that may make it more worthwhile.

Indeed, an in-depth analysis of three departments by the American
Police Foundation found the system to be of benefit in making more
middle-managers accountable, but was limited in its ability to fight crime.

"CompStat at these sites (Minneapolis, Newark and Lowell) did
markedly energize middle managers to do something about crime, but in
many respects, the pattern that evolved mimicked the reactive forms
of policing.

"CompStat seemed to engender a pattern of organizational response to
crime spikes in hot spots that was analogous to the Whack-a-Mole game
found at fairs and carnivals. Moles pop up randomly from holes in the
game board and the object of the game is to whack them with a paddle
before they submerge. A premium is placed on responding quickly
rather than (trying) to discern patterns.

"The pressure to act decisively and nip hot spots in the bud may be
an improvement over prior practice, but it does not conform to more
ambitious notions of how police can use data effectively to ascertain
the bigger picture and act proactively to get at underlying problems."

As for cutting crime, that remains an open question.

Stephen Mastrofski, one of the study's authors and director of the
administration of justice program at George Mason University in
Virginia, says there is little evidence to support the claim that the
system cuts crime rates.

"The evidence isn't terribly strong one way or the other."

He too points out that crime rates were dropping for years before the
creation of CompStat. But the unquestioning swirl of publicity around
dropping rates of crime in New York has been a major contributor to
more than half the police forces in the United States implementing
CompStat or similar programs. A report on the growth of CompStat,
also done for the Police Foundation, says a prime motivator was the
desire to reduce rates of serious crime, as had been supposedly done
in New York. And while that was a key reason, not all departments
have met with success. The slide in crime in some cities that have
been using CompStat has bottomed out, and even risen in some areas.

For the most part, though, cities which have adopted the system say
it has helped reduce crime in their streets. But police departments
aren't the most objective voices when it comes to questioning the
value of toys it buys for crime busting.

Mastrofski says such claims come from a look at the numbers, but when
crime begins to fall, there are many reasons, many of which we
probably are not even aware. CompStat is not the magic bullet.

Indeed, when crime was dropping in Seattle far faster than it was in
New York, the police commissioner there was asked what was causing the decline.

"We have no idea," he replied.

Needless to say, the commissioner is not being touted as a possible
presidential candidate, giving speeches to Winnipeg audiences or
dragging along an adoring train of media.