As Harford County implements the ComStat program, its creator says it will take strong leadership and adequate staffing to keep it from becoming a bureaucratic mess or a terrifying obligation for commanders.
Phyllis McDonald, who helped develop the ComStat crime-tracking program for the New York City Transit Authority, gave the last of three training classes Thursday for Harford County Sheriff?s Office commanders, politicians and municipal police.
Sheriff Jesse Bane said he hopes to implement the program by late summer, after his office develops the plan for exactly how it will be used.
McDonald said the program must be used to track trends and find patterns, not to make officers memorize and explain every crime that happens under their watch. That became a problem in Baltimore, where officer “productivity” seemed to become more important than strategy, and commanders were “scared to death” over memorizing statistics for their area, McDonald said.
“The leadership has to keep the meetings from becoming all about the data ? if they?re memorizing data just to go to the meetings, they?re not spending their time using it,” she said. “And if the leadership is abusive, then people won?t be creative; people won?t volunteer ideas.”
Sheldon Greenberg, director of the Division of Public SafetyLeadership at Johns Hopkins University, emphasized the need for all supervisors to be trained on using the data and attending first to fundamentals such as assigning enough officers to patrol.
“If the basics aren?t tended to first ? then the greatest ComStat program will fail,” he said.
Bane has pledged he would use ComStat to focus on finding problem areas and focusing police and community resources where they?re needed most, and McDonald said he seemed up to the task of using the system correctly.
However, manpower might become an issue as the county continues to grow: McDonald recommended that the Sheriff?s Office have three to four crime analysts using ComStat to track crimes countywide, but Bane said he currently has only one. Another is in training while the county seeks grant money for a third.
McDonald said technology in officers? hands is also necessary to keep the system from becoming clogged with paperwork.
“The more technology you have available, the less time has to be spent entering data,” she said.
