Since the landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the case Terry v. Ohio in 1968, its court ruling permitted police officers to stop and frisk a suspect on the street under certain circumstances. This permission has allowed what is commonly known as stop and frisk to be part of the police tactics. Based on a report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (2013, p3)[1], “over the nine-year period 2003 to 2011, the annual number of stops documented by police officers in New York City more than quadrupled, from 160,851 to 685,724, before declining by 22 percent in 2012.” Yet, the implementation of stop and frisk in NYC triggered public outcry against racial profiling. On August 12, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled NYPD Stop-and-Frisk unconstitutional.

What is embedded in this controversy is the use of Compstat, a system that tracks crime statistics and ultimately becomes a multi-faceted police management system.  There is no doubt that providing up-to-date crime information is valuable and well-intended. In the case of NYC, what makes Compstat powerful is the weekly meeting where police departments are   questioned about the crime data reported in Compstat. Under the intensive political and executive pressure, police departments were held accountable for the crime rate. This single focus of reducing crime managed by Compstat and its current trouble as reflected in the recent court ruling provide an excellent case to study how various aspects of accountability are manifested in operations.

In this research, we will review the use of Compstat in NYPD, both the advantages and drawbacks of the system, to study the boundaries of effective police performance management and its implication for government accountability. The key research question is: to whom and for what are police officers accountable when they interpret and implement the rule of laws? The paper raises the social justice perspective of police management. And, it matters to the larger discussion on governance and government accountability. The data for this research come from multiple sources: the database on the statistics of stop and frisk, news articles and interviews with people who are knowledgeable about the stop and frisk practices. The purpose is to explore the path and boundary of transforming the rule of law into practices, and integrating the practice with police management and working toward government accountability.