Check out this excerpts from today’s New York Times column, Policing by the Numbers:

“…the Police Department — where I served from 1983 to 2004 — has become a top-down, micromanaged bureaucracy in which precinct commanders are pitted against one another and officers are challenged to match or exceed what they did the previous year, month and week. Words like “productivity” are code for quotas. Supervisors must exceed last year’s “productivity” — regardless of community conditions, available budget and personnel, and, most important, the consequences to citizens.”

“The institutional culture that once allowed police officers to use their judgment has dissipated…”

“Discretion is essential to police work, but today, local commanders and patrol officers are allowed so little that their work is no longer problem solving but bean counting.”

Sound familiar?

You might also be interested in The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven.”