2008-10-24

L.A. police chief William Bratton spoke at Hopkins last night

He was very good. The topic was Policing in the 21st Century.

Afterward, I walked out to the parking lot with a few law enforcement types. They were lamenting that the audience was mostly suits, academic types and perky students from the Hopkins public policy program.

They said Bratton's book* was terrific. And they wished that Bratton could have spoken to an auditorium filled with Baltimore police.

Bratton spoke highly of CompStat (the inspiration for Martin O'Malley/Ed Norris's CityStat program). I asked the law enforcement guys whether CityStat was working well. They said it was a good system, but wasn't being used in the right way.


*I'm not sure which book they meant. I thought he had written a memoir a few years ago, but I couldn't find it on the web. He did write the forewords to these books: What Every Chief Executive Should Know: Using Data to Measure Police Performance, and The Compstat Paradigm: Managing Accountability in Policing, Business and the Public Sector.

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