CompStat

CompStat (also written COMPSTAT) is a police management system created by the New York City Police Department in 1994 with assistance from the New York City Police Foundation. Today, variations of the system are used in police departments worldwide. Under CompStat, the police department keeps a daily-updated digital record of crimes reported and in weekly meetings the department's leadership gathers to review trends in the data. During its early years, it was credited with decreased crime rates in NYC, though scholars are divided on whether it played a role. It has also been criticized in NYC for leading to data manipulation and increased stop-and-frisk searches.

==Origins== CompStat (in NYPD it is said to be short for "compare stats", but in LAPD it is said to be short for “computer statistics”) is a management system created in April 1994 by Bill Bratton and Jack Maple, whom Bratton met while he was chief of the New York City Transit Police and later hired as the NYPD's top anti-crime specialist when he became Police Commissioner in 1993. CompStat began as weekly meetings at One Police Plaza where officers were randomly selected from precincts and quizzed about crime trends in their districts and how to respond. At the time, the NYPD collected crime statistics every 6 months; under threat of transfers, they began to collect information daily. In February 1994, the department heads provided a hand count of major crimes in the first 6 weeks of 1993 and 1994.