CompStat and Its PerformanceStat Progeny

How and why was the original PerformanceStat leadership strategy adopted and adapted by many different public agencies and government jurisdictions?

Jack [Maple] is the smartest man I've ever met on crime.

WILLIAM BRATTON, Police Commissioner of New York City

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

PETER DRUCKER, Claremont Graduate University

One night in the winter of 1994, Jack Maple was sitting in Elaine's—an expensive, four-star restaurant and celebrity hangout on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—drinking. As befits any urban legend, the reports on what he was drinking differ. As Maple remembered the night, he was on his third glass of champagne. Maple's boss, William Bratton, recalled that he too was in Elaine's that night and insisted that Maple, because he knew that he "might get called to a crime scene at any time," usually drank multiple cups of double espresso.

Regardless of whether Maple was inspired by the grape or the bean, the dozen words that he scrawled on a napkin that evening have been engraved on the minds of numerous public executives who seek to improve performance and produce better results:

1. Accurate and timely intelligence

2. Rapid deployment

3. Effective tactics

4. Relentless follow-up and assessment

These are "the four principles" of CompStat, the leadership strategy developed in the New York City Police Department by Commissioner Bratton, Deputy Commissioner Maple, and their NYPD colleagues. Their purpose? To improve the department's performance, and thus to produce better results. Specifically, when Bratton became NYPD's commissioner, he committed himself and his organization to reducing the city's crime by 10 percent in the first year, 25 percent over two years, and 40 percent over three years.

The "CompStat Craze"

Indeed, in New York City, crime did drop. It dropped significantly. George Mason University's David Weisburd and Stephen Mastrofski and their colleagues have called CompStat "a major innovation in American policing." To George Kelling of the Manhattan Institute and William Sousa of Rutgers University, "Compstat was perhaps the single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the 20th century." William Walsh of the University of Louisville labeled it "an emerging police managerial paradigm." Dall Forsythe, now at New York University, called it an "effective management innovation." Mark Moore of Harvard has described it as "an important administrative innovation in policing." Indeed, in 1996, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government honored NYPD's CompStat with an Innovation in American Government Award.

As in any field of human endeavor, an innovation that proves successful (or merely appears to be successful) is disseminated through professional networks and informal channels to others who adopt and adapt it. By 1999, five years after Maple first scribbled down his four principles on Elaine's napkin, a third of the 445 police agencies in the United States with more than 100 sworn officers that responded to a survey reported that they had "implemented a CompStat-like program," and another quarter of these agencies said that they were planning to do so. This "Compstat Craze," as Christopher Swope called it in Governing magazine, was certainly a broad and rapid diffusion of this innovation throughout the policing profession.

Moreover, as police departments across the United States—and around the world—created their own versions of CompStat, they found Maple's four points worth saluting. In the Los Angeles Police Department, where Bratton served as police chief from 2002 to 2009, "the elements of CompStat consist of four distinct principles." To the Philadelphia Police Department, "the philosophy behind COMPSTAT is deceptively simple. It is based on four principles which have proven to be essential ingredients of an effective crime-fighting strategy." In Columbia, South Carolina, the police department introduced Maple's ideas about CompStat using almost exactly the same words: "four principles which have proven to be key ingredients of an effective crime-fighting strategy." In Escondido, California, the police department reported that "the CompStat process is based on four crime fighting strategies." The Minneapolis Police Department used a different name, CODEFOR (for Computer Optimized Deployment—Focus On Results), but still emphasized the same "four elements essential to crime control."

Big-city police departments are not, however, the only ones using the CompStat approach. Numerous departments in small cities and towns have also adopted this leadership strategy; they too have emphasized the importance of Maple's four principles. Sandy Springs, Georgia (population 100,000), simply called them "the elements." In West Vancouver, British Columbia (population 42,000), the police department listed them as "the four principles." To the police in Shawnee, Oklahoma (population 29,000), they are "four key principles." Burlington Township, New Jersey (population 20,000), called them "essential principles." Warwick Township, Pennsylvania (population 12,000), echoed Philadelphia, describing them as "four principles which have proved to be essential ingredients of an effective crime-fighting strategy."

Moreover, CompStat and Maple's four principles have been adopted not only to fight crime but also to reduce traffic accidents. And they have been employed not only by municipal police departments but also by police agencies at the state and provincial levels.

In the Canadian province of Manitoba, the Winnipeg Police Service created the term "CrimeStat"; the name may be different, but "the philosophy is built on [the same] four principles." In the State of Washington, the Highway Patrol named its approach "Accountability Driven Leadership," which "embraces many of the principles of COMPSTAT." In Australia, policing is the responsibility not of the municipalities but of the states, all of which...