Dear Editor,
I read with great interest the letter written by Kaniemo Alphonso under the heading ‘Wilson, broken window theory can solve crime problems’ (KN, October 22).
The writer said that former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani is on record as stating that his administration solved and reduced crime by more than 50 per cent because of this theory. This is not so. The broken windows theory was used extensively at Transit to reduce crime. Transit was not a part of the New York Police Department. At the time it came under the command of William Bratton who had Jack Maple as head of the Central Robbery Unit at Transit.
Leonard Levitt in his book Power and Corruption in the Country’s greatest Police Force NYPD wrote:
“Bratton had a policing philosophy. His was called Broken Windows. First articulated by two academics, James Q Wilson and George Kelling, the phrase refers to a building’s broken windows, which if broken by vandals and left unrepaired, lead to more vandalism, then more serious crimes. Translated to subway policing, this meant, conversely, that preventing the most common subway crime – fare beating ‒ would prevent more serious crime ‒ robberies. So Bratton went for fare-beaters. The result was a 13 per cent drop in fare-beaters and 40 per cent drop in robberies. It was the first drop in subway crime in a decade.”
When Giuliani appointed William Bratton Commissioner of Police, Bratton moved Jack Maple from Transit and appointed him Deputy Commissioner Operations – a move described as the “greatest leap in law enforcement history.”
Leonard Levitt posited: “Bratton lifted him from the bowels of Transit Police and installed him at One Police Plaza, as Deputy Commissioner Operations. This innocuous-sounding title belied Maple’s importance. It was he who would revolutionize the New York Police Department. His creation was known as Compstat, the Computer Statistical Analysis System on crime patterns and held all commanders accountable for crimes in their precincts. Maple had jotted down his four Compstat precepts – accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment of forces, effective tactics, and relentless follow-through on a napkin at Elaine’s.”
Applied to New York Compstat allowed the department to become proactive in stopping crime, rather than reacting to it as it had for the past twenty years. Bratton would call Compstat the symbol of the department’s new-found accountability.
Maple insisted that every precinct keep pin maps of robberies, burglaries, shootings, narcotics and gun arrests. That way he said commanders would properly deploy their men.
Maple demanded that crime reports be given to him monthly. Then he held twice a week three-hour meetings with the department’s top commanders. These meetings reviewed the crime stats of each precinct, the precise time a rape, robbery or shooting occurred. Each commander was then forced to explain how he planned to combat them.
Broken windows and Compstat had their negatives. They opened windows of opportunity for ranks to trample on basic human rights, which they did. In fact the state paid millions of dollars in out-of-court and in-court settlements to persons whose human rights were violated. Some of the meetings were confrontational and ended up in abuse and fights. Some commanders hid their true crime stats so as not to look bad.
Several commissioners after Bratton including Bernard Kerick, a former driver and bodyguard of Mayor Guiliani, continued with Compstat after the departure of Bretton with great success. You may recall that Kerick before he was jailed was contracted by both the Government of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago to help in the fight against crime, William Bratton is now an advisor to the British Prime Minister and was recently contracted by Trinidad and Tobago to fight crime using Compstat.
Here in Guyana the police are quietly doing some amount of Compstat work with some success. Deputy Commissioner Law Enforcement Seelall Persaud is doing a wonderful job in analyzing crime stats, looking at trends, patterns, series, sprees and hot spots, and this is bearing some fruit. It must be sustained. However, the main planks of Compstat ‒ accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment of forces, effective tactics and relentless follow-through must be intensified.
It would require tremendous human and non-human resourc-es. The Government of Guyana has been pumping huge sums of money into the Guyana Police Force to fight crime. This must be sustained. I hope that it will continue. Fighting crime and the fear of crime is very expensive. The resources must be really available.
The challenges faced by the Guyana Police Force are many. They defy any one-shot solution. Broken windows and Compstat if effectively used can go a long way towards reducing crime and the fear of crime in Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Clinton Conway
Assistant Commissioner of
Police (rtd)
