In
the 1970s, a music critic who chanced upon Bruce Springsteen singing at a local
club exclaimed, “I have seen the future
of rock and roll.” Had someone equally
astute about policing happened upon Sgt. William Bratton spearheading the
Boston-Fenway Project in 1977, the exclamation would have been, “I have seen
the future of law enforcement and his name is William Bratton.”
Just
as “The Boss” of rock and roll conquered ever larger venues using more polished
versions of his fundamental themes, William Bratton spent the 1980s and 1990s
transforming police department after police department using methods he had
first applied successfully in the Fenway district of Boston in the late 1970s.
In Fenway, Sergeant Bratton was sent down from headquarters to experiment with
new command strategies, the success of which launched him into the executive
ranks of the Boston Police Department. After rising as high as Deputy
Superintendent (at the age of 32), Bratton left the Boston Police Department
for a succession of police agencies where he produced ever more impressive
results. In Bratton’s first solo command, as Chief of the Massachusetts Bay
Transit Authority Police from 1983 to 1986, crime went down by 27 percent,
police morale went up, and the agency was one of the first in the country to be
accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.
Bratton then went on to modernize and reinvigorate the Metropolitan Police,
Massachusetts’ third largest police agency, as its superintendent from 1986 to
1989. At his next stop, the New York Transit Police from 1990 to 1992, overall
felonies were reduced by 22 percent, robberies by 40 percent, fare evasion by
50 percent, and riders came back to the system after years of fearful aversion.
As New York City Police Commissioner from 1993 to 1996, Bratton oversaw a
department that topped the performances of all the agencies he had led
previously, catapulting Bratton to national recognition.
It is
1998. The future of policing is here, courtesy of William Bratton. In
“Turnaround,” Bratton tells us how he transformed big-city policing. The book is must reading for every officer,
police supervisor and agency leader in this country. “Turnaround” should be
shackled to the wrist of every social science professor who ever pronounced
crime intractable, and to the ankle of every business and public administration
savant who doubted that government agencies could be re-engineered into
powerful and effective vehicles for meeting their mandates.
Bratton’s
Fenway debut was not flawless. He came to Fenway with the systems-control
mentality acquired from a stint in the Boston police commissioner’s office,
where rapid response, random patrols and reactive investigation (“the three
R’s”) were key operational principles. Also, the year was 1977 and Bratton was
but a year removed from the investigator/patrol officer’s world where policing
was defined by cracking the big crimes and catching the bad guys. So some of
Bratton’s first moves did little to win over Fenway’s diverse community.
Residents, many of whom were poised to flee the area’s declining quality of life,
did not want after-the-fact policing by officers otherwise hermetically sealed
in their vehicles. They did not want big police busts when that meant largely
ignoring the minor violators who created the hundreds of little bothers
residents endured daily. Neither the inputs Bratton so methodically applied nor
the outputs his officers so eagerly sought ranked as high priorities with the
community.
The
Boston-Fenway Project began to turn around because Bratton found out what the
community wanted. Bratton and his staff did their research with their feet,
attending upwards of seven community meetings a week, soliciting residents’
complaints and needs. By Bratton’s New York years, the methods had become more
sophisticated, including focus groups and survey research, but what Bratton
sought remained the same: concrete information about what citizens wanted from
their police. And Bratton’s response over the years remained constant: Give the
citizens what they want and they are much more likely to give you what you
want. In Boston, when Bratton attacked the petty crimes and violations so
annoying to residents, residents began to cooperate in helping to solve the
major felonies so annoying to police. Bratton was customer-focused long before
it became fashionable in government circles.
The
rapid adjustments in Fenway were made possible by a flexibility that Bratton
demonstrated from his first days as a police manager and has refined over the
years. This reviewer was struck, however, by the degree to which Bratton’s flexibility
was conceptual as well as tactical. It is one thing to know that Plan B can be
substituted for Plan A, yet another to be able to abandon foundering plans over
the inevitable objections of the plan’s creators and implementers. What is
truly special, and what sets Bratton apart, is his fundamental understanding of
why Plan A wasn’t working, and why Plan B likely would work. Bratton credits
his college education with broadening his vision of the police role, and with
sensitizing him to how different groups of citizens view police. Police can be
seen as protectors or as occupiers, Bratton learned, and public perceptions
interact with police performance to establish images of police as (responsible
or irresponsible) wielders of discretionary power and as agents of the
(oppressive or impotent or legitimate) state. These images do much to determine
the tactics that are likely to work, and tactics that work are likely to
enhance the images of the police in the eyes of the community.
Bratton’s
book also underscores the importance of lifelong learning for police
professionals. Many of the concepts Bratton has applied so effectively to
policing were unknown when Bratton went to Boston State College as a mid-career
student on a scholarship in the early 1970s. George Kelling had yet to write
about the decriminalizing of disorder. James Q. Wilson had yet to join with
Kelling to write how “Broken Windows” signaled that the authorities didn’t
care. Harvard’s Executive Session on Policing had yet to develop the community
policing concept. Still, Bratton kept up with them all. More importantly, he
applied them all, and in the process helped lead “an extremely conservative and
intentionally isolated profession” to a point where “the professionally
informed and educated police chief began to emerge.”
One
secret to Bratton’s success as a leader of police agencies is his commitment to
making life easier for the men and women on the line. He says: “Equipment helps
cops do their jobs, and it makes them feel good. I fought for these resources.…
If people feel you’ll fight for them, they’ll work for you.… They’ll take risks
to move the organization forward. ‘He’s meeting me halfway, so I’ll do it for
him.’ And once your people see that your ideas work, and they are praised and
rewarded for carrying them out, their work becomes easier and gets done
better.”
When
Bratton started doing these things in New York, my graduate students in public
administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice provided a steady, if
unscientific, sample of Bratton’s “people.” New York City cops, notoriously
cynical toward management, spoke of Bratton with a respect bordering on awe.
Witness a New York City transit cop speaking to me in 1991: “Three o’clock in
the morning, I’m assigned to this station in the middle of Brooklyn, and this
uniform, stars on the shoulders, comes walking down the platform…alone! It was
Bratton! I’d never even seen a Captain down here before, let alone the Chief.
He asked me about my job, what I needed, he signed my book. He changed this
place.” Or listen to a New York City Police Department patrol officer speaking
shortly after Bratton’s departure: “You wanted to work for Bratton. You felt he
was for the officer. You wouldn’t get your head cut off for every mistake. It made
you want to do more.”
Bratton’s
management approach relies heavily on trust and respect for employees. “Pick
good people and let them do their jobs” is Bratton’s credo. He knows that all
organizations have corrupt, inept or irresponsible employees, but refuses to
manage to the least common denominator. Railing against screw-ups, Bratton
understands, speaks not only to the unlawful employee (who is not likely to
change) but also to the innovative employee (who likely will change, but for
the worse, into a by-the-book minimalist). Instead of threatening all deviants,
he challenges all to excel. Bratton reserves the “deviant” label for unlawful
and unethical employee behavior, which he seeks to sanction severely.
Innovation then can be treated as what it is — an attempt within lawful
organizational parameters to do the job better, which deserves praise and
reward when successful, respect and “try again” encouragement when not.
Otherwise how can the sergeants and patrol officers make a Fenway project work
after it gets off to a poor start?
Bratton’s message to managers is clear: Think long and hard before you
issue error-avoidance policies so broad that, in the attempt to stop evil plots
from hatching, they wind up aborting good ideas.
Another
Bratton tactic for shaking up moribund police agencies was leapfrogging
promotions, elevating commanders two, three and even four ranks to the agency’s
top positions. This practice is much more than the “cleaning house” and “bringing in one’s own people” done
reflexively by most newly installed public executives. Cleaning house and creating a cadre of
personal loyalists serves principally to buttress the authority and control of
the incoming executives. The new leadership cadre comes from ranks immediately
below the old, is similar in age and thinking, and differs only in that new
leaders owe their high status to the new boss rather than to the departed boss.
Organizations are unlikely to change for the better in this way. Indeed, such
transitions are so predictable that their basic signal to the organization is
that little has changed — new faces, same old stasis.
Bratton
sent an entirely different message when recruiting his team. The personnel
review for executive leadership positions encompassed the top several ranks of
the agency. In-depth interviews with all agency executives were designed to
assess their ability to accept and implement radically new modes of operation.
To offset selection biases towards long-term headquarters executives, recent
high-level field command was a crucial selection factor. To leaven the
recruitment advice of agency veterans, Bratton sought the advice of police
officials and civilian experts from outside the agency. When this process led,
as it usually did, to Bratton vaulting members of the agency’s “younger”
management generation to top spots, the message to the agency was clear — new
faces, new ways of doing business.
As
prominent as his “turnarounds” of specific departments have made him today, 50
years from now histories of policing will most likely associate the name
Bratton with Compstat. Most law enforcement professionals have a vague
understanding of Compstat as some statistical, technological method for better
deploying the troops. But this superficial view pigeonholes Compstat as one of
many applications of technology to policing. It is anything but. Technology,
per se, floods policing. We have computerized fingerprint imaging, monitoring
of parolees’ whereabouts via electronic anklets and satellite positioning
systems, and patrol cars that are the equivalent of mobile mainframe computers.
What we didn’t have, until Bratton produced it in successively larger
departments, was an effective marriage of
technology and police management to produce decision support systems
that worked.
Big-city
police departments, and large public organizations in general, are necessarily
unwieldy creatures — segmented, centrifugal, inertial. In their daily
existence, organizations spew forth a miasma of information. The job of the
agency executive is to extract those nuggets of data most germane to effective
management. This data, furthermore, must be obtained from units whose chiefs,
on the whole, will resent, feel threatened by and/or resist outright
management’s data-mining efforts. To a great extent, the failures of public
management leadership are due to an understandable, but nonetheless
irresponsible lack of perseverance in combating inertia, overcoming the
squirreling of data by units, and making renegade unit heads accountable.
Bratton is the outstanding police leader of the later 20th century because he
developed methods, the most recent and successful being Compstat, for
overcoming inertial and centrifugal police organizations.
If
one were to pin an acronym on Bratton’s approach, it would be TACO—Technology,
Accountability, Communications and Openness. The genesis is technology at its
simplest. Compstat is essentially the 1990’s version of the paper maps Sergeant
Bratton first pasted on Fenway’s precinct walls in 1977. In those 1977 maps,
dubbed “Billy Boards” by the Boston cops, pins were stuck daily to represent
each crime occurrence from the previous day, color-coded by crime type. Any
police officer anywhere can go out right now and get a local map and some
colored push-pins and do the same thing, and in the process apply a
“technology” (the maps and the pins) to organizing information in ways that get
the job done better. By 1994 in New York, Bratton’s “Billy Boards” had become
computerized and were projected on a big screen, but the fundamental
“technology” was still maps and pins, not bytes and videos.
Technology
helps organize information in ways meaningful to managing. Technology, however,
can do nothing to impart the strength of character necessary to wield that
information in ways that make members of an organization truly accountable for
results. To do this, the manager must
regularly engage unit heads in “show and tell” sessions in which yesterday’s
(or last week’s or last month’s) results of unit activities are laid out; the
deviations from previous results are shown; the unit head is required to
explain why the deviations — for better or for worse — occurred, and the unit
head is required to explain what is being done to correct negative results and
build upon positive results.
Requiring
accountability takes guts and perseverance. You cannot change organizations
without a willingness to engage in a succession of skirmishes with wily
veterans of bureaucratic infighting. Their experience is that leadership has a
short attention span and is willing to settle for negotiated compromise. In the
NYPD, Bratton had to overcome chiefs who declared that they could not provide
information with the detail or frequency Compstat required; chiefs who
blustered and filibustered their way through Compstat “show and tell” sessions,
and chiefs who sabotaged the system with inflated and manipulated figures.
Every such instance is a sortie (and potentially a debilitating battle) that
requires engagement by top management if the organization is to change. Bratton
and his team were willing to meet these challenges and in the process sent a
message to the whole organization that Compstat was for real.
The
importance of Compstat as communications was underscored by the success of
Bratton’s team in winning the compliance of most chiefs as innovative and
enthusiastic participants in unit self-evaluation and improvement. More
important, the successors to the original cohort of chiefs had heard the
message clearly and ascended in rank ready and willing to engage with Compstat.
Communication was also crucial to Bratton’s overall strategies for
organizational change. He’d learned from chiefs he had worked for that
effective leadership required direct communication with the officers. From his
Boston days, Bratton did this by addressing the officers at precinct roll
calls, often making a point of delivering important department-wide messages
when he did so. By the time Bratton arrived in New York, with literally
hundreds of roll-call venues, he resorted to videos as a supplement to
in-person appearances. Bratton’s message, whether delivered in person or on
tape, was that leadership needed to connect intimately with the day-to-day line
business of the organization.
The
ultimate triumph of Compstat was its openness. In many ways Compstat was a
circus. Imagine 70 people in one room, upwards of half of your organization’s
operational commanders (the other half would come the following day). Imagine
this happening weekly. Imagine every command having its activities and results
from the previous week projected onto a giant screen for all to see. Imagine
each commander having to get up in front of this mob to explain those results —
why they compared favorably or unfavorably with previous results, or with a
neighboring precinct’s results. Imagine the commander’s testimony followed by
(even interrupted by) an open grilling led by, but not limited to, the
department’s top executives — a grilling that focused on what was being done
today to make things work better. Well, stop imagining. This is Compstat.
The
wide openness of Compstat was crucial to its success. In organizations, rumor
has currency, and spawns imagery that affects the organization. No chastised
commander has ever come out of a meeting with the boss without rumor and innuendo
about those meetings swirling immediately through the organization. These
“stories” about what happened generally serve the interests of the
storytellers, not those of the organization as a whole. In fact, rumor and
innuendo are most often detrimental to the organization, to wit: “They screwed Smith because they’re after
all us veterans who have served the department so well and so long.” “They told her it was about her performance,
but it is really because they want men in there.” “Jones went down because of
politics.”
Compstat
dissipates much of the negative organizational impact of rumor and innuendo.
The “Jones fell to politics” rumor may still float. However, if all of Jones’s peers know that for six months, at
24 consecutive public meetings, Jones could neither adequately explain nor
effectively change the dismal results of his command, the rumors are very
likely to be quashed by solid and public information about performance.
Compstat
is transferable technology. Already spreading through police departments
nationwide, Compstat is no less relevant to non-police agencies. Every public
manager should stand ready to mine his or her organization’s data exhaustively,
over the objections of unit heads if need be. Every organization should commit
to extensive dissemination of that data, arrayed in ways that are clear and
related to performance. Those data should then be used regularly to hold
employees publicly accountable for changes in performance, positive or
negative. For anybody who thinks this is asking too much, go read what Bratton
wrote. If he can implement Compstat in a 40,000-member agency of hard-bitten,
often cynical public servants, similar initiatives are possible anywhere.
Toward
the book’s end, Bratton describes how he contemplated running for Mayor of New
York in 1997. What an idea! Although Bratton ultimately decided that 1997
wasn’t the year — Mayor Rudolph Giuliani looked to be, and proved unbeatable —
I couldn’t help fantasizing. With the next election in 2001, and the incumbent
Mayor term-limited, was the time approaching when “the Boss” would step out of the police arena and into the
stadium of big-city politics? What could Bratton accomplish as chief executive
of New York City? This city, after all, has the country’s largest municipal
government and is staffed by a heavily unionized work force, conditions that
constitute a prima facie basket case in the eyes of some business-school
analysts. The city suffers from the whole panoply of urban social and economic
ills deemed chronic and irreversible in certain social science circles. Mayor
Giuliani has already done much in New York to puncture these claims (without
doing much to quiet the claimants), as have mayors in Philadelphia,
Indianapolis and Los Angeles.
This
reviewer, for one, would like to see Bill Bratton step into the big arena in
2001. I believe that what he made work in police department after police
department — right up to the country’s largest — will work in even larger
venues. It is Bratton whom I’d like to see on stage leading the band — because
he wrote the music. I have seen the future of public administration, and his
name is William Bratton.
(Reviewed in Law Enforcement News, Vol. XXIV,
Nos. 491, 492; June 15/30, 1998.)