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officers had implemented CompStat, with another 25 percent planning to do so.
    That success opened up career opportunities for many ranking NYPD officials. Maple formed a consulting company and demanded handsome fees for spreading the gospel in the New Orleans; Birmingham; Philadelphia; Newark; and Jackson, Mississippi police departments. Bratton moved to Los Angeles and brought CompStat there. Much of his “cabinet” also found jobs with other police departments: Chief John Timoney assumed the helm in Miami and Philadelphia; Wilbur Chapman took the reins in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Gary McCarthy was the Newark police chief before moving on to Chicago; Ed Norris ran the Baltimore Police Department. Even ex-mayor Giuliani got in on the CompStat gravy train, scoring a $4.5 million contract to bring the strategy to Mexico City after he left office in 2002.
    Over more than a decade, then, Jack Maple’s modest proposal—the CompStat strategy—had burnished the careers of four police commissioners, two mayors, and countless underlings. It had influenced police chiefs across the country. It had generated scholarly articles and appeared in books. However, along the way, it had developed flaws that were, outside the police department, understood by very few people.
    Some observers questioned the claims that CompStat led to the reduction in crime in New York City. There were attempts to attribute the crime drop to other things: fewer “crack babies,” more mandatory prison sentences, more cops on the streets. Economist Steven Levitt pointed out in 2004 that while the media credited new police strategies like CompStat, a better economy, and tougher prison sentences, he believes there were moreimportant factors, like the aforementioned massive funding for new police officers. Moreover, he noted that the sharp decline in crime was experienced across the nation, not just in New York, and in cities that didn’t follow the CompStat model—suggesting that there was more at play than just what was going on in one city. In what must have been viewed as sacrilege by the CompStat devotees, he argued that “innovative police strategy” had little or no effect on the crime decline.
    In the beginning, crime was so out of control that once the NYPD committed to CompStat, it was easy to reduce the numbers, but as time went on, it got harder. At the same time, crime numbers became inextricably linked to career trajectory. Those two factors combined to provide an incentive to precinct commanders to fudge the numbers to look better in those CompStat meetings.
    Perhaps the first public example—and there were more that did not filter out of the department—took place in 1995 when the
New York Daily News
obtained a memo written by the commander of the Bronx’s 50th Precinct that offered instructions to officers on how to downgrade felonies to misdemeanors. In 1996, the press reported on two rapes, a murder, and a shooting of a car thief by a cop that were not reported by the department. In 1996, the Bronx’s 41st Precinct commander was suspended for downgrading crime complaints and tossing—or “shitcanning”—other crime reports. Two years later, then-Commissioner Safir was forced to disclose that subway crime had been under-reported by 20 percent for years. That disclosure led to the forced retirement of the commanding officer of the transit unit.
    In 1998, State Comptroller Carl McCall tried to audit NYPD crime statistics as part of a broader audit of all city agencies. The Giuliani administration fought the effort, sparking a nearly two-year court battle. McCall ultimately won in 1999, but the report he released in 2000 was tepidly done. It focused on a small number of complaints and found an “error rate” in reporting of less than 5 percent.
    In 2002, once again in the Bronx’s 50th Precinct, a rape was logged as a lower crime. In 2003, the department disclosed that 203 felonies had been downgraded to misdemeanors in