Sizing Up Compstat: An Important Administrative Innovation in Policing

Weisburd et al. have provided quantitative evidence documenting what seems to be an important trend in policing, namely, the widespread adoption of what they characterize as COMPSTAT-like management systems in American police departments.They have also done a thoughtful job of trying to say just what COMPSTAT is, and what parts of it are old and which parts are new.And, they have begun the process of evaluating COMPSTAT by trying to locate it in a wider set of trends in the way that police departments are structured and managed to produce particular results.All of this is exceptionally helpful to interested citizens, police managers and leaders, and police researchers as they try to take the measure of this important innovation in police management.The other commentators, too, have made useful contributions to our shared understanding of the lessons of COMPSTAT.Firman, more unambiguously enthusiastic about COMPSTAT than Weisburd et al., finds in COMPSTAT an elegant managerial "package" that seems to strike the right balance between focusing a police department on internal process versus substantive result, and between exercising hierarchical control over departmental activities and encouraging initiative and innovation at lower levels of police departments.Klinger finds in the Weisburd paper a demonstration of the importance and practicality of investigating the processes that lead to the diffusion of innovations in the field of policing, and provides a very useful summary of this field to help police researchers get started in carrying out more research of the type Weisburd et al. have done here.My comments will focus on what I take to be the important lessons of COMPSTAT.More specifically, I would like to take up the following issues raised by this paper, and by the commentators:1) What exactly is COMPSTAT?2) How new is it?(Or more precisely, which parts of it are new?) 3) How "strategic" is it?4) Why did it disseminate so quickly? 5 ) What gives COMPSTAT its behavioral power inside police department