Research of Stephen Mastrosfski

Center for Justice Leadership Continues Support of Police Reform in Trinidad and Tobago

The Center for Justice Leadership and Management, part of George Mason University’s Administration of Justice Program, received an additional $1.4 million award to continue providing research and technical assistance to the Ministry of National Security of Trinidad and Tobago.

Over the last year the Center has been leading a consortium of universities, firms, and consultants to assist the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service in accomplishing a comprehensive overhaul of its organization and practices. The Center’s faculty and outside collaborators have assisted in developing plans to improve the Police Service’s performance management system, its disciplinary process, the prosecution of criminal cases, recruit training, and the promotion of integrity. GMU faculty have taught seminars and short courses on strategic crime control, and those courses have produced crime reduction plans that the Police Service will implement. A pilot project is underway to improve the quality of crime reports that police make.

The Center has an ambitious agenda for the next year. With the Center’s guidance the Police Service will launch a series of initiatives to reduce crime. It will establish an interagency working group to reduce the nation’s homicide rate by implementing the principles of problem-oriented policing. It will establish several smaller working groups to focus on other types of offenses, such as kidnapping and robberies. A special unit will be created and trained to support these efforts with sophisticated crime analysis and crime mapping technologies. And a demonstration project will be initiated that joins innovative police strategies with a grassroots movement to reduce crime in a gang-ravaged community.

The GMU team will also assist in other organization-building efforts to improve management, increase organizational efficiency, develop a comprehensive in-service training program, and create a command college for supervisors and upper-level administrators.

During the next year two people will be located full-time in Port of Spain to coordinate the project’s efforts, while other researchers will make frequent trips to the twin-island nation, located a few miles off the northeast coast of Venezuela.

Stephen Mastrofski, Professor of Public and International Affairs, is the project’s principal investigator, and Edward Maguire, Associate Professor of Administration of Justice, is co-principal investigator. Other ADJ faculty involved are Catherine Gallagher, Jon Gould, Devon Johnson, Cynthia Lum, and David Wilson. Outside partners include the Justice and Safety Institute at the Pennsylvania State University, Justice and Security Systems (a consulting organization in the D. C. area), and consultants from Arizona State University West, Bowling Green State University, Harvard University, San Francisco State University, and University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Local experts on crime and social problems in Trinidad and Tobago will also participate.

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

Compstat is probably the most popular innovation to hit American police departments since New York City’s finest first showcased it in 1994 under the leadership of Commissioner William Bratton. It has been hailed as a management and technology system that transforms police organizations from sluggish, dysfunctional bureaucracies to sleek and effective instruments of crime control. Compstat’s advocates claim that this is accomplished by making the police more responsive to management direction, by making managers more strategic in how they use their resources, and by arming them with the ability to acquire and analyze data for decision-making about crime on a timely basis. Only five years after its New York debut, nearly 6 in 10 police departments with over 100 officers reported that they had adopted or were planning to adopt Compstat. Advocates of Compstat claim that it is responsible, at least in part, for the decline in violent crime where it has been implemented.

A team of researchers, using data gathered for a study conducted by the Police Foundation, has issued a series of publications that provide the first unbiased, systematic assessment of why Compstat is so popular and how it actually operates. Based on a national survey of municipal and county police departments with over 100 officers, the researchers found that departments that had adopted a Compstat-like program were in fact more likely to have implemented certain key elements of the program, but not others. Compstat adopters were more likely to implement features that conformed to a traditional, paramilitary approach to management: a highly-focused mission and top-down direction of operations – rather than a more participative style that emphasized flexibility and creativity. The survey also showed that many departments indicating that they had not adopted a Compstat program, nonetheless reported adopting quite a few of Compstat’s elements, even before Compstat had been introduced in NYC. Thus, NYPD’s landmark program appears to be, not a radical change, but rather the culmination of a more widespread evolution in the management of American police organizations.

The researchers also conducted in-depth observations in three cities that had adopted New York’s Compstat model: Lowell, Minneapolis, and Newark. They found that these departments adopted New York’s approach without making many modifications from the NYPD prototype, accepting without much scrutiny the claims of its effectiveness. Those Compstat elements that were most thoroughly implemented were also those that required the least disruption to pre-existing organizational routines. The departments did focus precinct commanders’ attention more sharply on a crime control mission; precinct commanders were strikingly more accountable for doing something about crime problems in their areas; and crime data were available on a much more timely basis. However, other features of Compstat were less fully implemented: organizational flexibility, effective use of data in decision making, and innovative problem-solving measures. Indeed, some aspects of Compstat conflicted with others. For example, the pressure to make precinct commanders accountable for identifying crime problems early and taking action swiftly tended to inhibit collaboration with others to fashion effective strategies and to try innovative approaches to dealing with crime. Also, the police agencies were not well-prepared to become effective users of the more timely crime-data that their Compstat programs generated, because managers were not experienced or trained in how to use the technology of modern crime analysis for strategic decision making.

Finally, the researchers noted that it is not clear that declines in crime in these three cities following the implementation of Compstat could be attributed to Compstat. In all three cities, crime was declining before Compstat was introduced.

The researchers conclude that although Compstat may have facilitated certain changes in the management of American police organizations, current evidence suggests that it has not produced a radical transformation in policing and its contribution to crime reduction remains undemonstrated.

Willis, James J., Stephen D. Mastrofski, and David Weisburd. Forthcoming. “Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments” Law and Society Review.

Weisburd, David, Stephen D. Mastrofski, James J. Willis, and Rosann. Greenspan. Forthcoming. “Changing Everything So That Everything Can Remain the Same: Compstat and American Policing.” Chapter in David Weisburd and Anthony Braga, eds., Prospects and Problems in an Era of Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Willis, James J., Stephen D. Mastrofski, and David Weisburd. 2004. “Compstat and Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Challenges and Opportunities for Change. “ Justice Quarterly 21:463-496.

Weisburd, David, Stephen D. Mastrofski, Ann-Marie McNally, Rosann Greenspan, and James J. Willis. 2003. “Reforming to Preserve: Compstat and Strategic Problem-Solving in American Policing.” Criminology and Public Policy 2:421-456.

A Skeptical Assessment of Community Policing

This essay offers a skeptical assessment of the most popular police reform wave to pass over America in the last half century. This book chapter focuses on the core community partnership element of community policing. The author finds that community policing advocates have promised that the reform will deliver a great deal, but that after a few decades of reform, the results do not rise to the level of expectation created.

The quantity and quality of the evidence is itself disappointing, but considering that which is available, the author concludes that the glass of community policing’s benefits is closer to empty than full. Its implementation has not transformed the structure and operations of American policing so much as it has altered its rhetoric. While there may be a few community-policing exemplars among the nation’s police departments, there is little in the national policing landscape to assure that structures and practices have been strikingly altered.

The evidence of community policing’s effectiveness resides primarily in its capacity to make the public less fearful of crime, while doing little to reduce crime itself. While collective action promises to provide real benefits to the nation’s neighborhoods and communities, community policing advocates are still struggling to find the elixir that will transform quiescent and alienated citizens into virtuous civic actors. While perhaps shifting the bases of police and government resource mobilization toward those who engage in collective action, community policing has not necessarily been effective in spreading these benefits to those who need them most, society’s disadvantaged. Its capacity to serve effectively as a bulwark in the defense of the homeland against terrorism remains at present only wishful thinking.

The author argues that the problem is not with the ideals of community policing, but with the largely uninspired and poorly implemented methods used to implement the reform. Most police departments have treated it as an add-on rather than something that requires a radical transformation of how the police and public organize to do policing. Such a transformation would require that the police first engage a community that can serve as an effective partner, and once that is accomplished, the police will inevitably require sharing far more power with the community than they have thus far been willing to do. This is risk taking of a major sort, because American police have long struggled, often with good reason, to build effective buffers from community pressure, and it is not at all clear that enough citizens are willing to commit the necessary degree of effort, especially in the most afflicted areas.

These partnerships, even those most earnestly pursued, have been constructed, often with the acquiescence of citizens, to prevent truly potent political organizing to evolve. A cynic might even suggest that this is their intended purpose. Whether that is so, they represent a bland version of the ideals of a democratically invigorated policing in America. Without a piquant dish of community policing, America lacks a true test of its potential to flavor our communities with beneficial outcomes. American police and their communities would be better served spending less time celebrating community policing and more time figuring out how to do it in a meaningful way.

Mastrofski, S. Community Policing: A Skeptical View. Forthcoming. Chapter in D. Weisburd and A. Braga, eds., Prospects and Problems in an Era of Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Research on Controlling Street-level Police Discretion

The author was one of the contributors to a volume recently published by the National Research Council, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence. In a subsequent essay published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the author offers a critique of the NRC volume’s ability to say much about how to guide the exercise of police discretion at the street level. He notes that the NRC volume provides a review of research on the causes of street-level police behavior, but the report offers little insight into how to control that discretion effectively. This is not due to deficiencies in the report, but rather to deficiencies in the available research. This article discusses four problems with that research: underdeveloped theory, weak research designs, insufficient generalizability of findings, and measurement of police discretion that really matters to policy makers, practitioners, and the public. Special attention is given to the last problem, and recommendations are made for improving the quality of research to better inform choices about how to control police street-level discretion.

Mastrofski, Stephen D. 2004. "Controlling Street-level Police Discretion." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 593:100-118.

The Constitutionality of Suspect Searches in an American Police Department

This study used field observations of patrol officers at work to determine how often their searches of suspects met constitutional requirements for Fourth Amendment search and seizure protections. The study was conducted in the 1990s in “Middleberg,” a medium-sized American city. The Middleberg Police Department was a highly regarded, professional agency dealing with high levels of violent crime by using a community policing approach that encouraged community outreach and aggressive enforcement in high-crime areas.

The study found that thirty percent of 115 Middleberg suspects searched experienced constitutional violations. Relatively few of these violations were so severe as to “shock the conscience,” but the general pattern indicated that large numbers of people in Middleberg were subject to searches that would fail to pass constitutional muster. Almost none of these flawed searches became subsequently visible to the courts, since only a handful resulted in an arrest.

The pattern of arrests suggested that a disproportionate share of the constitutional violations were motivated by the department’s “war on drugs,” especially for stop-and-frisk searches. The researchers found that the majority of constitutional violations were accounted for by a small number of otherwise model officers actively engaged in community policing. The authors note that it is not appropriate to generalize these findings to other police departments in the United States, but argue that the nature and extent of these violations is troubling. They call for additional research in a wide range of communities.

Gould, Jon. B. and Stephen D. Mastrofski. 2004. “Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior under the Constitution.” Criminology and Public Policy 3: 316-362.