Cops had stopped, questioned, and frisked thousands of New Yorkers during Bratton’s run in the mid-’90s. But the numbers were not rigorously compiled, and they were not included on the CompStat menu. “We’d always avoided making stops a part of CompStat,” Bratton says. “That type of activity didn’t have a place in CompStat. It was encouraging the precinct commanders to feel that they wanted more numbers.”
Mike Farrell, who began his career under Bratton and rose to become a deputy commissioner under Kelly, scoffs at Bratton’s account as revisionist history. “It had nothing to do with a strategic choice,” he says. “Those numbers simply weren’t collected.” A lawsuit growing out of the fatal 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, however, forced the department to start keeping accurate count of stops, with the process kicking in during the first years of the Bloomberg administration. “The rationale to incorporate the stops statistics into CompStat,” Farrell says, “was, ‘What are all of the indicators that reflect enforcement activity in the command?’”