« Compstat » in Paris: a device for prompting police initiatives and accountability

“Compstat” is a neo-liberal quantitative management tool that has been invented in the NYPD during the 1990s and that has been imported in Paris during the 2000s. This ethnographic study shows how it works in France. It describes how the new use of numbers is associated to the high valuation of “prises d’initiatives” (discretion) and of “mise en responsabilité” (accountability) of the officers, the meaning of these two terms being closer to the domain of accounting than that of administrative law