First-Line Supervision Under Compstat and Community Policing: Lessons from Six Agencies

Over the past few decades, community policing and Compstat have emerged as two of the most highly visible attempts to transform police organizations in the United States. Heralded as strategic reforms that increase the ability and capacity of police organizations to handle unstable and uncertain environments and to deliver public services more effectively, it is surprising that they are rarely implemented in a fully coordinated fashion. This report is the third in a series studying this co-implementation issue, focusing on how these reforms have affected supervisory practices unevenly. We used data from on-site focus groups at six police agencies, differing in size and organization that had implemented both community policing and Compstat. The main findings of this study showed that while Compstat helped the supervisors recognize emerging crime problems, it had little effect on encouraging innovative responses to those problems. Community policing was seen as a good idea by the majorit