Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

dog,) 38 will behave properly even when direct orders are unavailable and no punishmentis threatened. Orders from superiors still supersede individual judgment,but fewer orders are necessary. By the same means, an organization can decentralizeits command and maintain a rigid hierarchy with overall direction comingalways from above.The NYPD command structure shows how these various organizational elements----decentralization, discretion, teamwork, discipline-can be meaningfullycombined, while at the same time demonstrating how a militarized organizationcan pursue community policing strategies. As commissioner, Bratton streamlinedthe departmental bureaucracy and introduced a new management style. Thisworked in two directions. It returned much of the day-to-day control to the precinct level, but it also established performance evaluations and required precinctcommanders to track weekly crime statistics. At the crux of the new system wasa computerized method of analyzing crime statistics, called "Compstat."Twice a week, all the commanders would meet and review the situation inone precinct. m This left each commander with enormous freedom to determinethe day-to-day operations of his area. But every few weeks the entire precinct'sperformance would be brought under close scrutiny, and the commander wouldhave to answer some hard questions:I want to know why these shootings are still happening in that housing project!What have we done to stop it? Did we put Crime Stoppers tips in every recroom and every apartment? Did we run a warrant check on every address atevery project, and did we relentlessly pursue those individuals? What is ouruniform deployment there? What are the hours of the day, the days of theweek that we are deployed? Are we deployed in a radio car, on foot, on bicycle?Are they doing interior searches? Are they checking the rooftops? How do weknow we're doing it? What level of supervision is there? When they're workingtogether in a team with a sergeant and four cops, do they all go to a mealtogether? When they make an arrest, does everyone go back to the precinctor does one person go back? Are we giving desk-appearance tickets to peoplewho shouldn't be getting them? What are we doing with parole violators? Dowe have the parole photos there to show? Do we know everybody on parole?Parolees are not allowed to hang out with other parolees, they're not allowedin bars. Of the 964 people on parole in the Seventy-fifth Precinct, do we knowthe different administrative restrictions on each one, so when we interviewthem we can hold it over their heads? And if not, why not?140The grilling could be intense, and it put pressure on the precinct commanders to getresults. 1his pressure then moved down the chain of command, affecting every leveland every branch of the New York Police Department Bratton describes the effectWe created a system in which the police commissioner, with his executivecore, first empowers and then interrogates the precinct commander, forcinghim or her to come up with a plan to attack crime. But it should not stopthere. At the next level down. it should be the precinct commander, empoweringand interrogating the platoon commander. Then, at the third level. theplatoon commander should be asking his sergeants. "What are we doing todeploy on this tour to address these conditions?" And finally. you have thesergeant at roll call-"Mitchell, tell me about the last five robberies on yourpost"; "Carlyle. you think that's funny, it's a joke? Tell me about the last five217