University of California, Berkeley criminologist Frank Zimring attributes much of the decline to the hiring in 1994 of William Bratton as commissioner of the New York Police Department. Bratton introduced the CompStat process, which changed the police’s central performance measure from arrest count to crime reduction.57 He made removing guns from the street a high priority. Bratton made officers more accountable for their performance.58 And Bratton prioritized breaking up open-air drug scenes, just like European cities had. That included breaking up the large and infamous one in New York
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