Research of James Willis

Compstat and Community Policing: Taking Advantage of Compatibilities and Dealing with Conflicts

Professor Willis with Chief Bratton, LAPD

Within the last twenty years, community policing (CP) and Compstat (CS) have appeared as two powerful engines of police reform. Community policing, a term associated with a broad range of priorities, organizational changes, and activities, promises a host of benefits. These include more effective crime control, better police-community relations, and more responsive problem solving. Compstat, an innovation in police organization that combines clearly defined management principles with cutting-edge crime analysis and geographic information systems technology, promises to focus like a laser on just reducing crime. Prior research has suggested that both innovations diffused rapidly, and that many police organizations are trying to pursue both simultaneously. In spite of the popularity of these programs among police and policy makers, there is virtually no systematic research on how these reforms work together.

The reform literature and empirical research suggest that there are reform elements where CP and CS are similar, and there are elements where they differ. This COPS-funded research is the first national assessment of Compstat and community policing. It uses a national survey of municipal and county police departments with over 100 officers to identify the kinds of benefits and challenges that police departments have confronted when implementing community policing and Compstat, and when trying to operate these reforms simultaneously. Our purpose is to assess whether the reforms have proven complementary or conflicting, to learn what departments have done to try and overcome the challenges they have faced, and to identify “lessons learned” that may lead to the possible improvement of how these reforms are implemented.

To this end, we are also conducting 4-5 day intensive site visits at seven police departments that have reported fully implementing Compstat and community policing. While on-site, we are conducting in-depth interviews with the chief, command staff, crime analysts, and other department members, observing Compstat and community meetings, going on ridealongs, and conducting a focus group of first-line supervisors. Respondents are asked to describe how the organization implemented community policing and Compstat, the substance of their programs, the experience of reform, and their assessments of successes, surprises, disappointments, and failures.

Our hope is that this project will provide detailed knowledge of program and process that is an essential first step for helping police leaders diagnose whether they have incompatibility problems, how to check for these problems, and some plausible approaches for reconciling these problems.

James Willis, Assistant Professor of Administration of Justice, is the project’s principal investigator, and Stephen Mastrofski, Professor of Public and International Affairs, is the co-principal investigator. Other faculty and graduate students involved are Edward Maguire, Associate Professor of Administration of Justice, and Tammy Kochel, a doctoral student in Administration of Justice and a research associate on the project.

Convict Transportation and Imprisonment in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: What factors influence penal change?

This historical research examines the transportation of British convicts to America and Australia in relation to its penal cousin, imprisonment. It asks, “What factors influence the state to adopt a particular form of punishment at a particular point in time?” I question prior academic explanations for the emergence of the penitentiary (e.g., Radzinowicz and Foucault) for failing to consider why Britain continued to rely so heavily on transportation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In marginalizing the importance of transportation, these assessments have attributed the rise of imprisonment to internal changes in the penitentiary and ruling class influence (e.g., elite desire either for humanitarian punishment or for a more efficient institution of repression). Efforts to promote the modern prison had been ongoing since the late 18th-century, but they were unsuccessful until the late 19th-century. A powerful historical answer must account for why something did not happen or, in this case, why it took so long.

Using historical documents and secondary sources, my analysis adds two interdependent explanatory factors that help account for the timing of transportation’s persistence and eventual replacement by the modern prison. First, I try to show how the organization and administration of the state’s penal apparatus changed the state’s capacity to punish, moving from a decentralized organization of the state to a highly centralized one, and also moving from a patrimonial system of judicial administration to a bureaucratic one. These changes were part of a larger trend in British government. Secondly, I suggest that changes in political culture and practice (increasing democratization) required that policy makers adjust to a shift in the definitions of liberty toward greater state intervention in citizens’ lives. The centralization of state power transformed the capacity and willingness of the populace to pressure national power-holders into protecting them from arbitrary state actions, including punishments. As part of this democratic claim-making, Parliament was finally motivated to overcome the long-standing opposition of county magistrates and take control of a local prison administration distinguished by variability in prison conditions and in severity of punishments. As a further result of this significant shift in the relations between ordinary people and policy-makers on a national scale, the British government was ultimately compelled to abandon transportation. Since it exposed convicts to unequal punishment at the hands of colonial settlers and infringed upon the will of the Australian people, it was no longer compatible with emergent democratic ideals.

Willis, James J. (2005) “Transportation versus Imprisonment in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Penal Power, Liberty and the State.” 59 Law and Society Review 171-210.

Making Sense of Compstat: How a Popular Police Reform Works and Doesn’t Work

Willis, James J., S.D. Mastrofski, and D. Weisburd. 2007. “Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments.” 41 Law and Society Review 147-188.