More NY CompStat Follies

Dissent is crushed, immediately and without mercy:

• Another cop, a cinder block of a man named Adhyl Polanco, also loves the New York Police Department. Or he did until he ran afoul of a body he describes as ever more consumed with writing nuisance tickets, executing dubious stop-and-frisks and arrests, and manipulating crime reports.

  It’s also a department, he discovered, that squashes any hint of dissent.

  Officer Polanco said his supervisors in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx instructed him to slap handcuffs on teenagers guilty of nothing more than a boisterous walk to school. They told him to change reports of felony burglaries and attempted murder to far less serious charges of trespass and reckless endangerment.

  In 2009, he detailed his complaints in a long letter to Internal Affairs. He had tape-recorded several of these incidents. Many months later, the department filed charges against him — for filing false arrest papers.

When all else fails, attack the messenger. Not just attack, but destroy him as a warning to all other messengers. We hope that some whistle-blower statutes are going to make Officer Polanco a very rich man at some point, especially with his tapes.

Author, professor and former NYPD Captain John Eterno is quoted extensively and provides statistical evidence that once again, destroys CompStat as a policing tool:

• “Make no mistake: There are quotas, and that is illegal,” a former New York City police captain, John A. Eterno, told the audience.

  Mr. Eterno, as it happens, is a particularly difficult critic to dismiss. Once he trained officers to stop and frisk. Now a professor at Molloy College, he and Professor Eli Silverman of John Jay College of Criminal Justice surveyed more than 100 retired police captains, and detail their findings in their recent book “The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation.”

  The former captains spoke of an unrelenting, often unethical pressure to manipulate crime statistics. In addition, the professors studied police and health data and found weird divergences. City hospital data shows a 90 percent increase in emergency room visits for assaults from 1999 to 2006. But police data for the same period records a nearly 50 percent decrease in assaults.

We doubt government stats as much as anyone else, but if you break them down into the simplest of components, there's less chance of manipulation. That last paragraph is very difficult to explain away.