Author: Reply All
Publisher: Gimlet
Publication Year: 2018
Summary: The following podcast episodes focus on how police departments’ usage of CompStat went awry. CompStat was introduced by Jack Maple, a NYC transit cop, in the early 90s as a way to track crimes, and to see who was committing them. Very quickly, the system was abused by officers who wanted to meet quotas and make their neighborhoods look safe (by misclassifying certain types of crimes). Maple argued that fewer arrests would indicate that a city had gotten safer. Rudy Giuliani, however, argued that, “Crime goes down, arrests go up.” Giuliani got the final say, which lead to endless illegal searches of largely minority individuals for decades.