NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it's widely credited as contributing to the incredible drop in crime. I don't buy for a second that ending these kind of programs will help anything. Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing. We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as much as ever. We need to root out the worst abusers and show them that bad behavior will be punished severely.
Crime rates nationally dropped also during the same time - and not all areas had the same analytics. It's really not clear if the reductions were from the NYC stats or in particular "agressive" law enforcement.
"Since Compstat was introduced, crime rates in New York City have dropped dramatically. From 1993 to 1995, the total crime rate declined 27.44 percent across the city."
National crime rates dropped as well in that period but nowhere near 27%.
Seems like national stats maybe lagged NYC a little, but from a slightly different range of 1994-2000 on this chart the drop was (eyballing) 35% for homicides.
This is so utterly compelling a rebuttal that I can hardly believe the original argument was made in the first place. You can't argue that tool X led to outcome Y if everyone had the same outcome without tool X, and in fact the evidence then leads to the opposite causality: tool X is useless toward outcome Y.
True, CompStat is not at all "widely credited" with contributing to the nationwide drop in crime. Even its contribution to NYC's drop is debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat#Critique
In Germany we have no "predictive policing" to my knowledge, and even cameras and so on are used conservatively given how privacy sensitive we ware. Yet we've seen the exact same development over recent decades.
There are secondary effects to "tough on crime policies", and more severe punishments do not necessarily increase deterrence effects on crime, and could even cause more crime. There is a very complex relationship between the factors that influence crime which is likely anything but linear.
"Tough on crime" statutes were implemented across much of the US 40 years ago, and the results we've seen are anything but a success story. Sure, crime has dropped, but at the expense of becoming the world's #1 country by incarceration and causing downstream societal effects as we lose economic productivity, rip apart families (and potentially create new criminals), and create public distrust of police.
Some might say that is a reasonable price to pay for a decrease in crime, but that doesn't hold water when we it compare to the rest of the western world who saw the same or even better drop in crime without all of the side-effects of the 'tough-on-crime' policies. Globalization, technology, and a drop in poverty caused this drop in crime, not 'tough-on-crime' policies.
I mean appropriately aggressive. There's still plenty of horribly dangerous people threatening citizens. It's part of the reason police in the US are so primed for violence.
Did NYC drop significantly more than almost every other city in America? Because they all dropped precipitously as well and most are not using these detailed analytics.
> NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it's widely credited as contributing to the incredible drop in crime.
I see the "NYC did X in the 90s and it caused crime to decrease" thing pretty often, but from what I've read, the real reasons for crime reduction in NYC aren't well understood, and when compared with crime reduction on the national level, NYC isn't really all that special; crime was dropping at similar rates throughout the country (and the world, even). So I'm not convinced that a NYC-centric examination of policy is at all representative. Not to mention that NYC itself is not a representative place, so what works in NYC may have no connection to what works elsewhere.
> Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing.
That's not the issue. The issue is that police are being sent to places, and because the computer told them to expect crime, they are primed to find crime, even if it's stuff they wouldn't bother with under normal circumstances. The simple act of saying "this neighborhood is a hot spot" makes it a hot spot, regardless of whether or not it actually is.
Put another way: the computer sends the police to places where there probably are some problems, but much fewer than police are primed to expect, so they end up creating problems in addition to any they solve. They get this "warzone" mentality where they feel like they're going into an "us vs. them" situation, where anyone on the street is assumed to possibly be a criminal. That's a recipe for unnecessary violence.
> We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as much as ever.
Effective, yes. We severely lack this in many places and need to work hard to fix this. Aggressive, no. That's why we're in the position we're in: aggressive assholes on a power trip who just happen to also be racist and think they're above the law.
> ...and show them that bad behavior will be punished severely.
That attitude suggests that you aren't really interested in making society better, just that you want to punish people for doing the wrong thing. But I suppose this shouldn't surprise me; based on incarceration rates and the state of prisons in the US, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in prevention and rehabilitation, just "sticking it to those bad people".
Crime has decreased everywhere since then (not just NYC) while the US prison population has increased 500% over the past 40 years.
> Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing.
Thanks for pointing out very clearly what you believe to be the purpose of policing. For a lot of cops as well, brutality is the goal. What we're seeing right now is Americans re-aligning those priorities.
Crime dropped faster and more consistently in NYC than almost anywhere else in the US. Plenty of big cities have been nearly immune to the national trend while NYC has done better and better.
https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/compstat-crime-reduction...