The NY Post reports that City officials on Tuesday unveiled a new digital version of Compstat that will give the public ‘”unprecedented”’ access to the most current NYPD crime statistics from Harlem to Hollis.
The innovative technology, dubbed Compstat 2.0, will be accessed by NYPD beat cops through their smart phones to give them more complete, timely reports on crime as it happens, officials said. The public can retrieve the information through a link on the Police Department’s Web site, which is currently up and running, officials said.
“CompStat 2 is the ability to take all of the CompStat information…with a few exceptions…and now share it with both you – the media – and to the public most importantly,” NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters at a press conference at police headquarters.
Those “exceptions” include crime victims’ names and the exact addresses of incidents, officials said. For now, in terms of crime locations, only the closest intersection will be released to the public, they said.
Mayor de Blasio attended the briefing, lauding the new program as “revolutionary.”
The crime numbers used in CompStat — the department’s 21-year-old crime-data tool — will be updated every Wednesday, allowing the public to review the numbers even before NYPD brass discusses the statistics at their weekly CompStat meeting held on Thursdays at 1 Police Plaza.
“I want people in this city to know this is another step toward being the strongest, best police force in the 21st century,” de Blasio said.
“We want people to know what is going on their neighborhoods,” the mayor said. “We want that transparency.”
Up until now, the public did not have access to this level unless they went to the precinct and asked for reports, which would be redacted of names and addresses.
The technology, which can be released through https://compstat.nypdonline.org, will give any user the ability to conduct a crime-data analysis of a certain area, mapping statistics down to the nearest intersection.
Jessica Tisch, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for the information technology, said the new program “is designed to provide unprecedented access to NYPD crime statistics essentially to give the public the data and the tools they need to view, map, and analyze NYPD crime numbers.”
Users can view citywide Compstat numbers for crimes including, murders, assaults, shootings, rapes, robberies, felonies, and grand larcenies, broken down by borough or by precinct.
Historically, rapes had been only mapped by the precinct and not by the nearest intersection.
“No other police department provides an analytical engine for crime mapping and review,” Tisch said.
The NYPD’s rank-and-file access to the data will also improve policing, officials said.
So far, 25,000 cops or 70 percent of the force have been issued smart phones. All 36,000 cops on the force will have smart phones that can access the data by next month, officials said.
Officials praised the smartphones used by police officers for helping to fight crimes.
“The fact that these smartphones provided these basic tools to cops has in and of itself driven productivity in this department and that’s even before you start to discuss the custom applications that are available to the cops on the phones,” Tisch said.
One app alerts cops of 911 calls even before they come over the radio. A blast messaging app allows them to get officer safety alerts and missing person alerts. The phones also have a mobile fingerprinting system.
“Yesterday, 5,329 cops swiped their ID on the back of their smartphone to use one of the custom designed apps,” said Tisch.
Those 5,329 cops looked at 28,941 911 jobs, viewed 2,079 wanted fliers, and ran 36,000 searches or queries of databases, according to Tisch.
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