With much fanfare, the NYPD announced today the launch of CompStat 2.0, a newly public, online version of the data tool that the department has used since 1990 to map crime statistics by precinct. The new version of the online tool launched this afternoon and will be updated each Wednesday, meaning that the public will for the first time have access to the week's crime statistics before they are addressed at the NYPD's weekly review session on Thursdays.
The website allows you to map the week's crimes down to the nearest intersection; you can also see crimes charted by the day, and see how the week's crimes compare to historical averages.
Rape, which had previously been mapped to the nearest precinct house in NYPD internal data, is now mapped to the nearest intersection. Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology Jessica Tisch said that this is "to ensure victim privacy but also to give the public a better sense than they had in the past of where these crimes are occurring."
Shooting victims this week since 1993. (CompStat 2.0)
This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy piece detailing how the NYPD punished Officer Edwin Raymond, who fought the department over quotas. The piece discussed CompStat extensively, and cited a study that found that "[o]fficers who had worked during the CompStat era were twice as likely as their predecessors to say that they had been under intense pressure to increase arrests, and three times as likely to say the same about the pressure to increase summonses."
When asked whether this latest iteration of CompStat might inadvertently encourage quotas, Bratton didn't mince words, calling the idea "bullshit."
"Bullshit is my response to that," he said. "If any of my cops out there still think we're pushing for summonses, I'm sorry, we're pushing to reduce crime...So that officer, among 36,000, that may be his impression. He's entitled to that impression, but those are not the practices, policies, and procedures that I'm bringing to this organization. He's entitled to his opinion. I don't share it."
