ICE IS FALLING FROM THE NEW YORK sky, but New York City police captain Thomas Lawrence looks as if he's been out in the sun too long. It's just past 7 on the third morning of the new year, and Lawrence, who runs the 10th Precinct in Midtown Manhattan, is standing on a podium in the command control center at police headquarters--the "war room." His face is bright red and a little clammy. His body is wired up tight. He is surrounded by sheaves of statistics, screens filled with computerized maps and charts and N.Y.P.D. bosses, who, amazingly, seem to know as much about crime in his precinct as he does. "It's been 30 days since we've seen you, Tom," says Chief of Department Louis Anemone, a dark tone creeping into his voice. "And we're seeing an increase in robberies."
"What's the pattern here, Cap?" asks Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple, the department's thickset, dandyish crime guru. Using a laser pen, Maple scrawls on an overhead map, tracing robbery patterns the way John Madden diagrams football plays. Maple circles an archipelago of red dots: muggings along Ninth Avenue. "What are you doing to take these guys out?"
Lawrence launches into a first-rate description of his anticrime efforts, but the ceo of this organization--a slim, well-tended man who wears his reading glasses slung low on an impressive nose--barely looks up from his papers. Police Commissioner William Bratton designed these Comstat (short for computer statistics) meetings as a way to make his 76 far-flung precinct commanders--and 38,000 cops--accountable for the crime rate. Nobody had ever done it before, and it's working: total felonies in New York City are down 27% in just two years, to levels not seen since the early 1970s.
Crime had been falling gently since 1989, thanks to community policing strategies, a thinning in the ranks of the crackhead army and thousands of new prison beds and new cops. But as Comstat took hold in May 1994, the drop became a giddy double-digit affair, plunging farther and faster than it has done anywhere else in the country, faster than any cultural or demographic trend could explain. For two years, crime has declined in all 76 precincts. Murder is down 39%, auto theft 35%. Robberies are off by a third, burglaries by a quarter. No wonder Comstat has become the Lourdes of policing, drawing pilgrim cops from around the world--Baltimore, London, Frankfurt, Zimbabwe, Taiwan--for a taste of New York's magic.
If those waters seem bitter to some--cops who can't take Comstat's pressure, black and Latino leaders who say some of Bratton's cops carry his aggressive style too far--"that's too damn bad," says Bratton. Success isn't pretty, even for his troops. Effective precinct commanders such as Lawrence (crime was down 15% in his precinct in 1995) merely get grilled to a medium rare at Comstat. Those who show up unprepared, without coherent strategies to reduce crime, are fried crisp, then stripped of their commands. Half of all precinct bosses have been replaced under Bratton. Those who survive get unprecedented autonomy but have to demonstrate extraordinary results. Some feel pressured to shave their stats; as the New York Daily News reported last fall, a commander in the Bronx told his troops that assault arrests could be made only when victims suffered broken bones, not fat lips or black eyes. Crimes in the category plummeted in his precinct.