Chapter 12 Case Study: Does Compstat reduce crime?

1.What management, organizational, and technology factors make CompStat effective?
They have structured their organization to have officers report to a commander and a commander reports to the police headquarters. The commander is responsible for reducing the crime that goes on within the district they oversee. This is an effective way to make sure that they are doing their job because they are held accountable if the crime goes up. The commander is responsible for deploying their officers to the appropriate areas within their district based on the crime map provided by CompStat. CompStat assists the commander to properly manage their officers effectively and efficiently so that as a team they can reduce crime. These combined efforts make CompStat an effective tool that police departments can use to fulfill their goal.
2.Can police departments effectively combat crime without the CompStat system? Explain your answer.
No, I don’t think they can effectively combat crime without CompStat. CompStat collects and tracks crime complaints, arrests, crime patterns and police activities. This provides valuable information that would be hard to capture from paper. CompStat can determine what area within a district has an increased amount of activity. The police department can view this on the map and send more officers to patrol this area. Police officers are sent to the proper areas rather than sending officers to an area that has very little crime activity. CompStat is a guide that the police department can use so that they can patrol the neighborhoods more effectively.