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Government Leader home > news stories
02/21/07
ATF managers lift agent performance, conviction rates with compstat program
By John L. Guerra
Special to Government Leader
John A. Torres, special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Los Angeles, has been putting out a lot of fires lately — and he knows it’s been skewing performance statistics. Though his October numbers might show that gang arrests and seizures of illegal weapons are down, from L.A. to the Mexican border, he knows it’s not because his agents are in a slump.
It’s because there are fewer agents working the gangs in the past few weeks. He’s had to move agents off firearms investigations and put them on the heels of whoever wrapped matches around a cigarette and launched the Cabazon wildfires. The deaths of four young firefighters caught in the shifting winds of the inferno upped the ante to murder charges, so Torres put as many agents he could on that arson case.
A year after the implementation of a comparative statistics (compstat) program at ATF Los Angeles headquarters, Torres can quickly and accurately measure how well he and his fellow agents are doing their jobs. Launched in October 2005, compstat gives Torres immediate, accurate and revealing snapshots and deeper analysis of how well they manage time, agents and equipment as they pursue some of the largest and most violent criminal enterprises in the nation.
Before compstat, ATF Los Angeles didn’t have such an expansive method to measure performance. “Now if we see that a group of supervisors isn’t hitting the benchmarks in gang cases, we can quickly see that they’ve been assigned to other cases, like the fire,” Torres said. ATF Los Angeles is the first federal law enforcement group to use the system.
Compstat helps Torres and the supervisors under his charge measure arrests, convictions, progress of open investigations and other statistics quarterly, when they meet to discuss what they find in the numbers. It began to reveal gaps in processes from the start, Torres said.
“When we started compstat, we first identified some performance measures where we could have an impact on violent crime,” he said. “Nobody had done that before; there were no set measurements like this at our ATF office before compstat.”
Compstat draws its raw numbers from a desktop reporting system at the Los Angeles ATF office, called Nforce. Agents and investigators key their daily or weekly reports into the Nforce system, which was designed by PEC Solutions Inc., now a part of Nortel Government Solutions. Using Nforce data, the compstat system tracks the number of investigations launched, arrests by crime, conviction rate, number of multi-defendant cases and length of time from the launch of an investigation to arrest and conviction of defendants.
ATF supervisors receive quarterly readouts of their stats from the IT department. They then review and analyze their performance, which they each review in front of a quarterly compstat meeting. Participants include the Los Angeles Police Department, Orange County Sheriff’s Office, federal prosecutors and various crime task forces that work with the ATF. The group finds ways to improve the handling of confidential informants, ways to streamline the procurement of cash from ATF supervisors for fast-approaching undercover buys — anything that can improve the effectiveness of the organization.
“With compstat we now have the statistics and the tools to bring everyone into the room on a given date; everything is on the board,” Torres said. “You go over good work on convictions for the previous quarter and ask the agents, ‘How did you get [the convictions]? What did you do differently to increase your performance?’ It’s not a way to criticize agents, but to find out what’s working.”
The first statistic Torres discovered using the compstat process: His agents quickly improved their conviction rates. “Before, many thought 5 percent was the norm for convictions. We were actually at about 23 percent.”
“We’re seeing that home invasions — where criminals rob the homes of other criminals, such as drug dealers — are increasing,” Torres said. He plans to use compstat to measure a neighborhood’s crime rate before agents set up an undercover store front or other sting operation, then use compstat to see if the crime rate drops afterward. He also wants to employ map overlays and other geographic information system tools to position agents.
“Right now we’re just using numbers,” he said. “But we will move to map overlays. The LAPD uses maps to find hot spots. What extent we can do that? We’d like to do that.”
“It’s a challenge getting personnel to the right place at the right time,” Torres said. “It’s one of the many challenges we have, it’s making sure the resources are at the right places, while staying within budget.”
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