It's Criminal: CompStat Vs. Community Policing, Who Should Win?

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Last week, the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an article by Alex Emslie titled, Compstat vs. community policing.  In the article, Emslie notes that "District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi introduced a proposed ballot measure on June 7 that would require the police chief to institute foot patrols in all districts and ask the Police Commission to establish a written community policing policy."  Mirkarimi's proposal is one that, according to Emslie, is prompting "a looming debate involving the mayor and his police chief, who favor the high-tech yet impersonal CompStat model, and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors who are pushing for a community-based, cops-walking-beats blueprint for SFPD."

In other words, the debate our supervisors will be having is one that seeks to answer the question: Is data more useful than community involvement when it comes to reducing criminal activity?

As I read the information about CompStat, which Emslie describes as "computerized crime mapping software" that "emphasizes lowering a city's crime rate by centralizing authority, spotting statistical trends, and targeting crime hot spots," I couldn't help but be reminded of Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise, when the main character is told, after hearing that a few minutes spent outside may have exposed him to harmful chemicals in the air, "You are the sum total of your data.  No man escapes that."

The point of this scene in the book is in part to support DeLillo's notion that we aren't simply sum totals of data--that even in an increasingly technological age, we ourselves are human, and our central humanity must not be ceded to machines.  It seems from Emslie's article, though, that our police chief and Mayor Newsom want us to believe that we are "the sum total of [our] data."

Obviously, data is essential to our lives, and it does indeed help us solve problems.  In education, we need data on what our students do or do not understand in order to teach them what they need to know.  In our daily lives, we rely on information about the weather, traffic delays, transit problems in order to plan out what we will wear to work and how we will get there.

But statistical data only gives a part of the picture, and if we're only looking at a part of the picture, we will fail in our endeavors to change what that picture looks like--whether we're talking about a portrait of crime, our schools, or our transit system.  Consider this information, which Emslie quotes from "a 2003 study commissioned by the national Police Foundation."

The Foundation (after studying CompStat's use in three cities) came to the conclusion that "Compstat seemed to engender a pattern of organizational response to crime spikes in hot spots that was analogous to the Whack-a-Mole game found at fairs and carnivals." I can't imagine anyone who would think it would be a good idea for our approach to policing to resemble Whack-a-Mole, though the metaphor is an apt one: Police look at the data from CompStat and then use that information to act on trends. 

If, for example, prostitution is spiking along Shotwell Street, then police will react to that, presumably responding by patrolling the area and making arrests, and the same goes for other types of crimes, like theft and vandalism, that affect various neighborhoods throughout the city.

On the one hand, this seems like a smart use of both human and monetary resources: concentrate your efforts on the places that need them most.  But as the "whack-a-mole" analogy implies, any data-driven approach to a problem results in a lack of understanding of an issue as a whole. 

We might know that theft is a problem in the Central District, but unless we know why it's a problem, we will likely not see thefts decrease (despite the fact that the Central District Captain is pretty convinced that only two or three people are responsible for the widespread thievery there). 

The same is true for other issues that plague our society.  Here we are in the year 2010, and we continue to worry about the achievement gap in our schools that continues to reveal a disparity in success between white and Asian students on one side and Latino and African American students on the other.  Without understanding and addressing the institutional underpinnings that are responsible for that gap, though, we won't get any closer to closing it.

"Community policing," the practice that emphasizes foot patrols that allow officers to "develop relationships on their beats" and thereby "lets the community help set law enforcement priorities," seems, to me at least, the policing approach that might allow us to understand the "why" of crime rather than the simple "what, where, and how often" that CompStat data offers.  And if we start to understand the why, we might actually prevent crime, rather than simply create a means for punishing it after the fact.  Imagine that.

At the end of the article, Emslie informs readers that "The Board of Supervisors will consider Mirkarimi's measure and SFPD budget in July, airing a debate that could continue on to the November ballot, when voters would decide whether to maintain their faith in CompStat and the SFPD or ask for more community policing and foot patrols." 

In using CompStat, the SFPD seems be saying that you can't escape "the sum total of your data."  What we need to remember, however, is that statistics do not provide us all the data we need; some of the most crucial information can only be gleaned through human interaction--exactly the kind of "data" that will determine how we proceed in ensuring the safety of each of San Francisco's districts.