Intelligence-led policing requirements of COMPSTAT - Essay Example

Intelligence-led policing requirements of COMPSTAT A COMPSTAT policing program, like ILP, is basically a management program that relies on middle management to rally the lower ranks by defining the specific goals of a law enforcement agency’s jurisdiction. The program puts squarely upon the shoulders of management the entire responsibility of realizing goals, which is normally the reduction of crimes, as well as the obligation of fully knowing, understanding and presenting crime statistics and crime-related data. For example, during COMPSTAT weekly meetings, it is the responsibility of a commander to present all the data of crime-related incidences in his jurisdiction, while his staff is seated at his back to give him support. The implication of this is that the commander naturally throws in his ‘enthusiastic support and energetic leadership’ to the program and the immediate goal of the program considering that his name and reputation is on the line, which is tangibly manifested by his obligation to personally deliver the report in the presence of the top brass and other units. COMPSTAT, like ILP, is largely based on the analysis of crime-related data and statistics, with analysts forming an integral part of its operations collating all submitted crime-related data and making sense of them through crime mapping. The analysts then prepare the COMPSAT book, upon which the week’s presentation and discussions during the standard COMPSAT session are based on. The only difference is that in the ILP, the data gathered and collected are not necessarily known facts and statistics but unconventionally gathered data from tips, leads and reports of suspicious activities. Meetings and sessions are also held in the COMPSTAT policing program periodically conducted usually, at least, once a week. This meetings and sessions, however, cannot be strictly categorized as strategic and tactical, as required in ILP, because they consist mostly of presentation by a commander of the crime-related incidents in his/her jurisdiction and the strategies taken as a consequence and an interrogation of some sort by a facilitator, usually the chief or his designated assistant, of the commander. In these meetings, discussion is usually a bilateral affair between facilitator and commander, in the presence of peers, where the latter is asked to clarify the data he/she presented and the solutions and strategies taken by him/her to solve the crime-related issues in his jurisdiction. This does not contemplate the tactical and strategic meetings of the ILP where attendees put all their heads together to discuss the best strategies and tactics possible to a given problem. Another point at which COMPSTAT diverts from ILP is that the former focuses on crimes and threats, in general, and not on one or specific serious crimes. ILP centers its attention on particular offenders, rather than crimes in general, which are its targets. Moreover, its operations are focused towards big and serious threats such as terrorism and organized crimes. Unlike ILP, which is emphatic on analytical and executive training, COMPSTAT participants often bewail the lack of adequate training, and are forced to rely on a sample COMPSTAT book that serves as a model for all its future books that will be presented during future sessions. The lack of adequate training is perhaps underpinned by the fact that it is only the unit commander who is saddled with the responsibility of presenting and answering questions during COMSTAT sessions, as well as making the hard decisions as what programs are to be implemented to solve specific problems in his/her jurisdiction. However, this is only as far as executive training is concerned because it is difficult to imagine the analysts processing the data and information gathered to have undergone no extensive training. Since COMPSTAT uses data collected and gathered, processed and analyzed to forecast hotspots in a certain jurisdiction, it necessarily does away with reactive policing. COMPSTAT is all about re-prioritizing goals underpinned by identifying crime trends from statistics and crime mapping and therefore seeks to predict the occurrence of crime before they actually happened. This means that crime solution becomes proactive rather than reactive, which is also the goal of the ILP. This also necessarily implies that, like ILP, COMPSTAT should subscribe to less to traditional routine investigation. There are, however, studies showing that agencies using COMPSTAT do not show uniform application of the system’s principles and although the system’s strength lies in data use, internal accountability and mission clarity, all other elements are not as robustly implemented. In ILP policing, management spurs the agency into action to resolve the threat. Similarly, COMPSTAT places squarely on the hands of middle managers the task of providing solutions to crime-related problems on the basis of the data mapping and other analysis of the information, data and statistics gathered, collected and processed, which are deemed to be reliable and complete and are made available to other law enforcers. Q2: Can COMPSTAT ever be the basis for an intelligence led policing initiative? No. Although COMPSTAT and Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP) programs are both analysis-driven and management programs, there are stark differences between the two that would result in COMPSTAT not qualifying as basis for an ILP-led initiative. These differences are underpinned by the fact that these two policing systems have different goals, which dictate the kind of data that each collect and gather to base their actions on. Since these policing systems are based on different data and information platform, it is unlikely that an ILP-led initiative can rely only on the basis of COMPSTAT. COMPSTAT aims to reduce all kinds of street crimes and threats, in general, including burglary, robbery, homicide, assault and similar crimes, but ILP is focused on going after serious crimes such as terrorism, organized crime and the like. This difference in goal naturally affects their respective data-collection and gathering focus and systems. COMPSTAT, for example, relies on statistics representing official data in a given period, usually of the week prior to a meeting, while an ILP program depends on intelligence gathered from both police officers and citizens such as tips, leads and suspicious activity reports or SARS. The COMPSTAT data includes a synthesis of service calls, field interview reports, prisoner debriefings, incident reports, FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) records and other known and reported crime-related data. The incident reports and UCR make up the bulk of the COMPSTAT data. On the other hand, ILP data is culled from intelligence reports or raw data that includes mostly from extraneous sources such as SARs that were processed, analyzed and interpreted. The underpinning differences in goals where COMPSTAT aims to reduce crimes and threats, of all kinds, in general while ILP seeks to go after specific serious and prolific offenders such as terrorists, results in the forking of these systems into two different directions. In aiming at crime and threat reduction, COMPSTAT uses data that will indicate to authorities if there are potential or looming hotspots in particular areas within their jurisdiction. This data is used in COMPSTAT to forecast the likelihood of continued criminal incidents in an area, apply its resources to that area to apprehend criminals and disrupt criminal activities. On the other hand, ILP is largely more concerned with specific impending threats than crimes that have already happened in general. While COMPSTAT looks at known crime data to forecast the increase of crime incidences in an area, ILP focuses more on suspicious activities, which have not yet consolidated into crimes, to anticipate the happening a particular serious threat. Moreover, intelligence collected, gathered and analyzed in the ILP system must be previously defined as it targets only serious crimes such as terrorism and organized crimes. All other unrelated data are necessarily filtered out or are rejected. An ILP-led initiative, therefore, cannot rely on COMPSTAT data because of the traditional nature of the latter’s raw data. Since ILP’s goal is to anticipate serious threats, before they even happen, that directly affects the populace if they occur its data collection and gathering are more unconventional than that of COMPSTAT. Terrorism, for example, is best solved by anticipating it before it actually occurs not only because of the number of lives that are at stake but also because of the effect it has on the nation as a whole. Being an operation that requires stealth for its success, it is unlikely that large-scale terrorism will allow itself to be publicly detected at the inception stage by figuring in incidents that call the attention of police authorities. Terrorists will most likely shrewdly evade figuring in petty crimes so as not to call attention to themselves and to their activities. This is where tips, leads and SARs come in and why unconventional raw underground information is the bread and butter of ILP, unless data gathered in COMPSTAT glaringly points to seriously looming acts of terrorism or other big and serious crimes within the purview of ILP. Read More