On a per capita basis, New Orlean’s murder rate in 1995 was eight times higher than the national average and five times higher than New York’s. That scared residents and local businessmen, who rightly worried that rising crime could put a damper on the tourist trade. Pennington, hired away from Washington, D.C., by New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial in 1994, cracked down hard on police corruption. Since his arrival in New Orleans, 79 cops have been arrested for various crimes, 64 resigned under investigation and 272 have been disciplined. But cutting crime was the real priority. Capitalizing on the citywide mood of alarm, Pennington last year forced the city council to double police salaries and hire 300 more cops. He also got the New Orleans Police Foundation, a private consortium, to hire Jack Maple and his partner John Linder as $2,000-a-day crime-fighting consultants.
Maple, 44, gets much of the credit for the New York Police Department’s remarkable success in curbing crime between 1992 and 1994. A high-school dropout and a former transit cop, he was plucked from middle management to become the deputy to former commissioner William Bratton. Maple and Bratton installed a system called Comstat (for ““computer statistics’’) that cut New York’s homicide rate roughly in half. Comstat uses block-by-block data to pinpoint crime hot zones, then floods the hot zones with cops. ““Where all the dots on the map are, that’s where you send the cops,’’ Maple says. ““You go get the scumbags.''
An outlandish figure because of his dandyish dress and wise-guy persona, Maple faced plenty of resistance when he arrived in New Orleans last October. ““At first there was grumbling at staff meetings,’’ Pennington says. ““They wondered, “Who’s this little fat guy with the bow tie and the beard? What does any New York City person have to tell us in the Big Easy?’ But Jack turned it around on his own.’’ That’s partly because Maple talks and acts like the streetwise cop he is. But it’s also because Comstat, with Pennington’s backing, seems to be making a difference. Through the first nine months of 1997, arrests in New Orleans have jumped 26 percent, armed robberies have dropped 32 percent and homicides have declined 18 percent.
To the nationwide audience of cops, politicians and crime-obsessed voters, the New Orleans numbers suggest that Comstat is no fluke–that if it worked in cities as diverse as the Big Apple and the Big Easy, it can be replicated anywhere. Maple is emphatic on this point. ““If you used this system in Washington, D.C., it would turn into Mayberry RFD,’’ he says. There are two caveats. The first is that it is still too early to claim a breakthrough against crime in New Orleans. The second comes from criminologists who have long argued that police strategies have little impact on crime trends. To these skeptics, Maple’s success in New York was merely an ““unprovable correlation’’ between police work and a trend line that was already headed down because of demographic and economic forces. But the experts themselves are divided–and by some analyses, about half the drop in New York City’s crime totals is attributable to the more precise police tactics made possible by Maple’s number-crunching. ““Half of plenty is still plenty,’’ says Franklin Zimring, a Berkeley law professor. Given the sheer size of the nation’s urban crime problem, in other words, anything that helps the cops fight smarter is surely worth spreading around.
