With Increased Accountability Comes Increased Pressure

This weekend had a couple of interesting central Texas crime stories.

• Accused murderer returned to stand trial for Killeen murder
• Killeen announces city warrant roundup
• Bell court actions involving prison sentences outnumber probation
• Herald story details bond lowering for accused murderers who later were accused of other crimes

With Increased Accountability Comes Increased Pressure
There have been quite a number of stories in the news lately that point to the causes in the decline of crime nationwide. A majority of these stories mention holding police agencies accountable as one of the reasons for that drop in crime.

The most well known of these law enforcement strategies is the CompStat program that started in New York city in the mid 1990’s. The program as implemented at NYPD was infamous for the CompStat meetings where commanders would be unmercifully grilled about crime problems in there areas.

Now there’s this story from the New York Times that asserts that the pressure to perform proved too much for some NYPD commanders who took to fudging their numbers in order to appear better than they actually were. 

“Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics,” said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain.

This story comes on the heels of several news stories out of Dallas about their problems with crime stats. I covered some of those stories at this post.

Last month I posted this over at The Crime Map on Why Crime Stats Matter. In that post I have a great quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes. He once said:

“In order to understand what is, we must know what has been, and what it tends to become.”

The problem with fudging your stats is that you lose that objective measure of the effectiveness of your crime fighting efforts. While the NYPD commander’s who “gun decked” their stats saved their own butts in the short term, they hosed everyone who came after them. More importantly, they hurt themselves as they lost the ability to know what was working and what wasn’t.