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first time in the history of the police department that the same man served twice in the post.
    For Kelly, his appointment was a satisfying outcome. Ever since Giuliani had snubbed him, Kelly had been serving a kind of high-profile exile. He had done a stint overseeing a multinational police force in Haiti. He had gone the route of many ex-cops by taking a high-end job with Bear Stearns. He had worked in the Department of the Treasury. He had been commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service. Sure, these were big jobs, but they weren’t the NYPD, the place that had nurtured Kelly from patrolman, up through the ranks, through the Crown Heights riots, and the first World Trade Center terrorist attack. Kelly wanted that job, the only cop job there was. He wantedto sit again at Teddy Roosevelt’s desk on the fourteenth floor of 1 Police Plaza.
    Kelly’s face had the look of a pit bull, or of “Popeye,” in less flattering assessments on the cop bulletin boards. But he dressed like a CEO, with Charvet ties, gold watches, and tailored suits. For Kelly, the key to management was being involved, and so he acquired for himself the reputation of a micromanager. Eventually, no one got transferred unless Kelly himself signed off on it.
    Over the next eight years, Kelly would vastly expand the NYPD intelligence division and anti-terror units and hire an ex-CIA official to run them. He would send detectives overseas to man offices in foreign cities—even though they had no jurisdiction outside the city. He would order heavily armed squads of cops to patrol high-profile areas, like Times Square and lower Manhattan. He would send out lines of patrol cars, lights flashing, to remind the public of his fight against terrorism. He would create a high-tech crime and terrorism command center complete with big-screen televisions and rows of shiny new computers.
    He ordered the surveillance of dozens of peaceful anti–Iraq War groups and instituted an overly harsh crackdown on protesters during the 2004 Republican Convention. He also closed off many of the routes that reporters had traditionally used to obtain public information.
    Kelly could focus his attention on all of these things because crime continued to drop. Why mess with a good thing? In fact, Kelly expanded CompStat’s philosophy of tracking crime figures to other areas, including what he called “activity reports.” Spreadsheets can be used with any kind of numbers, and Kelly’s people began tracking the numbers of arrests and summonses of each unit in the city and, later, each cop in the city. They broadened what they were tracking to include stop and frisks, vertical patrols, community visits, and all manner of arcana. Soon, borough commanders were becoming concerned when the activity of a single police officer was down. This obsession with tracking statistics fit nicely with Bloomberg’s management philosophy. The mayor believed strongly in tracking “productivity” in his massive media and technology company, and he brought those principles to City Hall.
    The murder rate—that all-important bellwether figure of a city’s health—dropped below 700 per year and kept going down. And Kelly was on his wayto becoming the longest-serving police commissioner in the city’s history and probably the most recognized cop in the country—more well known, maybe, than the director of the FBI. It seemed that every chance they got, Bloomberg and Kelly reminded New Yorkers about the crime decline. As Giuliani did before them, they distorted FBI crime stats and claimed New York was the “safest large city in the country.”
    Meanwhile, the success of CompStat had spread across the country. Among other cities, Washington, D.C.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; Dallas; Detroit; Vancouver; Minneapolis; and Camden, New Jersey all adopted the strategy, or at least elements of it. CompStat even spread to London and Australia. By 2004, a third of the nation’s police departments with 100 or more