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Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

James J. Willis ,
Stephen D. Mastrofski  and
David Weisburd
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Abstract

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being “appropriate.” We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 147 - 188
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Superintendent Edward Davis, Chief Robert Olson, and Chief Joseph Santiago for granting us access to their police departments, and the many sworn officers and civilians who shared their experiences of COMPSTAT. We would also like to thank R. Richard Ritti, Herbert Kritzer, and several Law & Society Review reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. We are especially grateful to Russell Schutt for his extensive suggestions. A note of appreciation also goes to Ann Marie McNally and Orit Shalev, research associates on this project, and to Rosann Greenspan, a former research director at the Police Foundation. This research was supported by grant No. 98-IJ-CX0070 from the National Institute of Justice to the Police Foundation. Points of view expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Additional support for the writing of this article was provided by a Joseph P. Healey grant from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where the lead author was formerly affiliated.

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