Broad Plan Aims to Improve Police Rapport With Public
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Concluding
that crime reduction alone will not satisfy New Yorkers who often
say
that the police do not treat
them with respect, Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik
is planning sweeping changes
in how the department — from officers on foot patrol
to
precinct commanders —
interacts with the public.
The plan, which Mr.
Kerik detailed in interviews last week, seeks to
build rapport
between officers and
residents in several ways. Commanders will be
ordered to attend a variety
of community meetings, and to file detailed reports
describing residents'
concerns.
They will be expected to
use a customer service model, similar to that used by
Wal-Mart Stores, aimed at
making precinct station
houses more businesslike
and accessible. To that end,
officers will be assigned
to greet people as they walk
through station house doors.
Mr. Kerik said he was also
exploring installing A.T.M.-style
information kiosks in
each station house, and
using incentives like days off to
reward officers who work
well with the community,
just as they are now used
sometimes to recognize
officers who make significant
arrests.
Mr. Kerik himself has promoted
a former Queens
precinct commander who is
known for his development
of strong community ties
to review how effectively
precinct commanders respond
to local complaints. And
he said
he would hire a consultant to survey public
satisfaction
with the police.
The commissioner
explained that he hoped to use the
precinct
commanders' meeting reports and the survey to
measure
how well the police respond to neighborhood
issues,
and thus hold commanders responsible for
improving
community relations, an area where progress
has long
been difficult to document.
This quantitative
measurement would be a tool similar
to the
department's vaunted Compstat
process, in which
weekly
crime statistics are used to measure the
performance
of police supervisors. "We've got to make
certain
standards of accountability at the precinct and
then the
borough command level," Mr. Kerik said, "to
insure
that those people out there are interacting with
the communities
and responding to the communities'
needs,
where they can."
With just 11 months left
in his tenure, the commissioner
is looking to put his own
stamp on a department that
gained widespread recognition
for record crime
reductions under his two
predecessors, Howard Safir
and William J. Bratton.
Aides to Mr. Kerik said he was
well aware he would not
be seen as breaking any new
ground if his only accomplishment
was to continue the
downward trend in crime.
Mr. Kerik's plan is also
significant because it
acknowledges the severity
of a problem the department
has long downplayed. Since
the Brooklyn station house
torture of Abner Louima
in 1997 and the fatal shooting
of Amadou Diallo in the
Bronx in 1999, some critics
have argued that the department
has little understanding
of the minority communities
it serves.
Mr. Kerik's immediate predecessor,
Mr. Safir, had
argued that whatever breaches
did exist between the
police and these communities
were largely a product of
misperceptions fostered
by the critics and the media.
But with this plan, Mr. Kerik
appears to be
acknowledging that the department
shares the blame for
public resentment of the
police, and that a concerted
effort must be made to address
the problem and to
change the department's
culture.
"The culture change has got
to come from the top," he
said, "and has got to penetrate
every ranking officer in
the chain of command."
Although he said the department's
main goal remains
fighting crime, a draft
outline of the new plan, which
Mr. Kerik said he would
present to commanders on
Wednesday, notes that "any
further gains in these areas
will be hollow without the
full support of the
communities we serve."
Mr. Kerik said his plans
differed from the widely
publicized community policing
effort under Mr.
Giuliani's predecessor,
David N. Dinkins, in several
ways, including what the
commissioner said was the
earlier program's lack of
standardization and
performance indicators.
For his plan to succeed,
Mr. Kerik will also need the
cooperation of the department's
more than 27,000
rank-and-file officers,
many of whom are bitterly
disaffected and feel underpaid
and overworked.
Many also blame the Giuliani
administration's
quality-of-life crackdowns
for straining community
relations in the past. They
question whether enforced
attendance at meetings can
repair damage done by
zero-tolerance programs
that often blanket
neighborhoods with summonses
for minor infractions
and that, critics contend,
single out minority youths.
Mr. Giuliani recently pledged
an additional $100
million for the department's
overtime program, known
as Operation Condor, which
funds additional
quality-of-life sweeps and
other anti-crime programs.
Mr. Kerik, however, said
he thinks that improved
community relations and
quality-of-life enforcement
can go hand in hand, arguing
that aggressive
enforcement improves neighborhoods
for residents, and
better relations help the
police do their job by building
trust and understanding
between officers and residents.
He also said that improving
officer morale was a key
component of the new program,
which he developed
after meeting with hundreds
of community leaders and
clergy members and holding
focus groups with officers
and commanders.
In the focus groups, officers
complained that they were
often verbally abused by
sergeants and lieutenants,
which significantly affected
how they treated the
public. "You want the cops
to treat people with
respect," Mr. Kerik said
in last week's interview, "then
you better treat the cops
with respect."
The plan also includes new
training curriculum that
focus on community relations
for recruits and
supervisors and guidelines
for precinct commanders.
Those commanders will bring
patrol officers and those
from specialized units like
Street Crime, and narcotics
officers who do not work
undercover, to monthly
meetings so residents can
get to know the police who
work in their area and learn
what they do and why.
Michael E. Clark, who heads
the Citizens Committee
for New York City, which
provides training to some
12,000 neighborhood, block,
tenant and youth
associations, said the groups
he works with would
welcome more regular input
into how the department
polices their neighborhoods.
"Our hope would be that
this doesn't just involve
measuring how many times
people attend meetings,
but how many crime problems
get solved in partnership
with the community," he said.
One of the key elements of
the plan is the requirement
that all of the 76 precinct
commanders attend their
monthly Precinct Community
Council meetings. The
councils were formed more
than 50 years ago to
improve relations between
the police and the
communities they serve,
and until now, the commanders
could delegate a subordinate
to attend the meetings. The
commanders must also hold
a monthly meeting with
local clergy members and
attend a monthly meeting
organized by their local
community board's district
manager, which is held to
review city services.
After each meeting, commanders
must file a report
listing the main community
representatives at the
meeting, their telephone
numbers, the names of other
police officers or supervisors
who attended and
whether they were introduced.
The two-page report
form requires them to detail
individual issues raised at
the meetings, with check-off
boxes to indicate whether
they are new or old, and
if old, when an issue was first
raised. There is also space
for commanders to indicate
any action taken in response.
Reports will be filed with
the police commissioner's
office, where, Mr. Kerik
said, they will be reviewed by
his staff, headed by Deputy
Inspector James E.
McCabe, who until recently
commanded the 110th
Precinct in Corona, Queens.
Mr. Kerik said he brought
Inspector McCabe to his
office to oversee the new plan
because as precinct commander,
he had developed
strong community ties.
If the same issues keep appearing
on a precinct's report,
Mr. Kerik said, the commander
will have to explain
why they have not been resolved.
Another of the plan's major
components is the customer
satisfaction survey that
Mr. Kerik hopes will be
conducted every month in
each precinct to measure four
or five leading indicators
of citizen satisfaction with
the police.
The deputy commissioner for
policy and planning,
Maureen E. Casey, who is
overseeing much of the plan,
including the design of
a pilot survey, said about 100
people in each precinct
would be questioned. Their
names would be culled from
the current 75 to 100
Police Department forms
that require contact
information, among them
enforcement paperwork, like
arrest reports, summonses
and stop-and-frisk forms, as
well as other routine documents.
Ms. Casey said the department
planned to hire an
independent marketing firm
to conduct the surveys,
which officials hoped would
serve as an early warning
of problems and concerns
about local policing. She
also said it would alert
department officials to
neighborhoods where satisfaction
was on the rise, so
that successful programs
could be exported to other
precincts.
Efforts to improve the way
officers interact with the
public are not new. In 1996,
Mr. Safir unveiled a $15
million Courtesy, Professionalism
and Respect
campaign to improve the
behavior of what he called the
1 percent of the force who
did not act appropriately.
Three years later, he updated
the program with
wallet-sized cards instructing
officers to address
people as "sir" or "ma'am."
While Mr. Kerik's plan is
more ambitious, he
acknowledged that the changes
he sought would not
occur overnight, or even
in a few months. But, he said,
"it should happen, because
to create a better working
relationship between the
police and the communities,
it's just a benefit to the
entire city."
-------------------------------------------
January 8, 2002 - NYT
Kelly to Order Greater Use of Crime Data
By KEVIN FLYNN
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly will require commanders
to make greater use of Compstat,
the computer-based crime-tracking system, to measure and
respond to quality-of-life offenses like
panhandling, police officials said yesterday.
The police will use computer-generated pin maps, derived from citizen
complaints and other data, to
identify areas where quality-of-life offenses like public drinking
are occurring regularly, the officials
said. Officers will then be deployed accordingly.
For years, the police have generally used Compstat to track the frequency,
but not the location, of low-
level offenses. Mapping has been used to track more serious crimes
like robberies and burglaries.
The expanded use of Compstat is part of a larger plan to address quality-of-life
offenses that Mr. Kelly is
expected to outline today. Both he and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have
said repeatedly in recent days
that they plan to continue the Giuliani administration's focus on low-
level offenses.
Among the other measures Mr. Kelly is expected to introduce will be
a program to encourage New
Yorkers to call an existing phone line to report quality-of-life problems.
Police commanders will then be
held accountable for the success they show in responding to the complaints,
the officials said.
Officials said that last year the phone line (1-888-677-5433) received
117,000 calls, of which 82 percent
were complaints about noise. But they said that was probably only a
fraction of the complaints that would
be logged if the phone line were better publicized.
When complaints come in, they are logged and forwarded to the local
precinct. Police officials said
auditors would be assigned to review how commanders respond to the
reports of neighborhood
problems, most likely at so-called Compstat meetings, in which supervisors
are regularly questioned
about their progress in curbing crime.
Mr. Kelly presented his broad plans for the department yesterday in
a meeting with senior commanders at
Police Headquarters. He said he planned to revive a promotion system
for the upper ranks in which
panels would recommend nominees based on set criteria. Some in the
Police Department have said they
feel that the promotion system in recent years had grown too discretionary
and subject to favoritism.
Mr. Kelly also told the commanders to expect overtime to be curtailed
this year because of the city's
budget crisis.
-------------------
March 24, 2002
Crime-Fighting by Computer Widens Scope
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
New
York City's renowned Compstat crime-fighting program, originally created
to measure and map
serious crime in city neighborhoods, has grown into
a sweeping data-collection machine that traces
hundreds of factors, many of which appear distant from the nuts and
bolts of police work.
The system, introduced in 1994 to focus largely on the seven major crime
categories, has changed in ways
both substantial and subtle, and now records 734 of what officials
call indicators: everything from
concentrations of prostitutes to police overtime, allegations of abuse
by officers and how often police
commanders meet with community leaders.
The expansion reflects an acknowledgment that fighting crime is not
just about finding criminals and
arresting them, but about enlisting the support of communities and
finding a way to do it economically.
In effect, Compstat has become an intricate map of the city and its
ills — the annoying and the deadly —
and an abacus upon which officials can calculate how the Police Department
is working to alleviate them.
Gone are the days when murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, grand
larceny and auto theft were the
central focus of searing Compstat meetings in a cavernous room on the
eighth floor of 1 Police Plaza.
Under the current commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, Compstat has further
evolved, focusing also on
minor offenses that can have a major impact on the quality of city
life: panhandling, squeegee men, loud
parties and barking dogs. And the weekly meetings have become more
collegial, with an atmosphere, Mr.
Kelly said, in which commanders are often put on the spot but spared
the abuse that many glumly suffered
in years past.
"It's been broadened, and again, it is more collaborative, in the sense
that we're trying to share information
as to what was done by other commands to address problems," said Mr.
Kelly, who took over the force in
January in his second tour as commissioner.
Compstat has long been admired nationally and internationally; the system
has been used by cities like
Baltimore, and Caracas, Venezuela, plans to use it. The concept has
also been copied in its hometown,
where it has been brought into other agencies like the Sanitation and
Correction Departments, and where
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is considering using it to measure the effectiveness
of other city agencies.
The innovation was created and developed under William J. Bratton, the
police commissioner from 1994
to 1996, the first two years of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's administration;
one of the primary architects
of the program was Jack Maple, Mr. Bratton's deputy commissioner for
crime control strategies. Mr.
Maple died of cancer last summer.
Mr. Bratton used Compstat to direct swift deployments of officers to
areas with high concentrations of
crime and to hold commanders accountable for crime problems in their
precincts.
His approach turned into a police philosophy that changed the way departments
across America and in
other parts of the world serve their communities, drawing a nonstop
procession of police commanders and
government officials from as far away as China and Chile.
Soon after it was introduced, it became part of the culture at 1 Police
Plaza: twice-weekly meetings in
which local commanders were pushed, prodded and sometimes humiliated
by senior officials who
pinpointed crime problems on their streets and broadcast their failings.
Mr. Bratton defended the aggressive nature of the sessions in the early
days, arguing that precinct
commanders were making $80,000 a year. "If they can't deal with the
pressure of that room, you can be
damn sure they can't deal with pressure out there on the street," he
said.
Mr. Kelly, however, said he felt that commanders, who are each running
what he called the equivalent of
a $30 million to $40 million business, "shouldn't be abused, they should
be treated with dignity and
respect, while held accountable for what happens on their watch."
Eli B. Silverman, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
and the author of "NYPD Battles
Crime: Innovative Strategies in Policing," said a certain amount of
pressure was required in the program's
early days. "My own view was that in the beginning it needed to be
very forceful because you were
starting something very different," he said.
Mr. Kelly, who has made upgrading department technology a priority,
says he hopes to use
teleconferencing to broadcast the now weekly meetings to officials
in boroughs beyond the one under
scrutiny each week.
And, it seems, there is much to learn. Mr. Kelly said the meetings now
focused on the number of precinct
arrests that were made by officers on overtime patrols, part of an
effort to reduce costs and ensure that
enforcement is driven by crime rather than an officer's desire for
more overtime.
Compstat now also measures emergency response time, conditions in police
station houses and how many
police cars are available for patrol and how quickly those in need
of repairs are turned around in the
department's shops.
The system also records the number of corruption allegations and civilian
complaints of police abuse in
each precinct, which along with community relations are important indicators
of how a department serves
the people, according to Mark H. Moore, a professor of criminal justice
policy and management at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Professor Moore,
who has been studying methods
to measure police performance for five years, contends that crime reductions
alone provide an incomplete
picture of a police department.
He maintains that a police force's performance — or "profits" — can
be accurately gauged only by
factoring in the "costs" of police operations: not only the financial
costs, but the toll that police operations
take on community relations, or how the department's use of authority
impinges on citizens' liberties.