Maple attended Brooklyn Technical High School, a school specializing in math and science.
College/University
Career
Gallery of John Maple
1999
Times Square, New York, United States
Jack Maple walks along the median in Times Square, New York City, where he had worked as an undercover transit cop.
Gallery of John Maple
1986
Photo of Jack Maple by Bruce Gilbert, Newsday Photo.
Achievements
2014
20 Richard Davis Dr, Richmond Hill, GA 31324
The city Police Department renamed the CompStat Room the Jack Maple CompStat Center in honor of the Richmond Hill native and crime-fighting strategy guru.
The city Police Department renamed the CompStat Room the Jack Maple CompStat Center in honor of the Richmond Hill native and crime-fighting strategy guru.
The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business
(Maple told the story of his effective campaign against cr...)
Maple told the story of his effective campaign against crime in ''The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys out of Business.'' With Chris Mitchell he wrote of war stories involving notorious criminals with names like “Freddy Krueger” and of the police work necessary to apprehend them. Booklist reviewer David Pitt said the book is “told in a lively, fast-paced style,” and felt that it will appeal to readers of police fiction, by writers such as Joseph Wambaugh and William Caunitz, as well as to fans of crime nonfiction.
Jack Maple was an American visionary, innovator and a great police leader, who changed the face of policing in New York and America. He is widely credited with creating and developing CompStat, the crucial law-enforcement strategy tool the New York City Police Department uses to track patterns and proactively fight crime.
Background
Jack Maple was born in Richmond Hill, New York in 1952. He grew up in his family home on the corner of Forest Park at 108th Street and Park Lane South, where the late Deputy Police Commissioner developed his lifelong love affair with Queens and New York City. He was the son of a postal worker and a nurse.
Education
Maple attended Catholic schools, then Brooklyn Technical High School, a school specializing in math and science. He skipped school often, usually to spend the day at the Museum of Natural History. He dropped out before his senior year to sign on as a trainee with the Transit Police. He eventually earned his diploma from Fort Greene Night School.
Maple worked at a variety of jobs - unloading United Parcel Service trucks, as a men’s room attendant, and as a page boy. His father, worried about the direction in which Maple was headed, urged him to take all the available civil service exams - post office, fire department, police, and transit. Maple’s first post as a transit trainee was in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was injured while trying to make an arrest and nearly killed when a drug dealer from whom he was making a buy grabbed Maple’s gun and turned it on him. Maple recovered his weapon and shot, but didn’t kill the dealer. Maple began at the lowest level of police work, patrolling the subways of New York City. He also insisted on making arrests on the street while off duty. His actions were met with punishing assignments requiring two-hour commutes and holiday duty.
At 27, Maple became the youngest detective in the Transit Department. When Police Commissioner William Bratton first came to New York City in 1990 to lead the city Transit Police Department (then a separate agency) Bratton met Transit Police Lt. Jack Maple, who sculpted a powerful crime-fighting initiative that grew to become “CompStat,” the centerpiece of the city’s crime control strategy under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
When Bratton assumed command of the NYPD in 1994, he made Maple First Deputy Police Commissioner, his second-in-command. Under Bratton’s watch, Maple’s maps were computerized, precinct commanders were held accountable for crimes in their areas and the original CompStat computerized crime strategy system of tracking, mapping and quickly disseminating crime statistics was born.
Under the original program, officers and their commanders were held responsible for the crime in their “sectors” and all crimes, including loitering and public intoxication, were aggressively pursued. Precinct and squad commanders were also grilled at monthly meetings where they were required to provide proactive solutions to local crime conditions – or face the wrath of a panel of the city’s top cops.
NYPD statistics show that between 1990 and 2013, with the CompStat system in place, homicides in New York City plunged by a whopping 80 percent. The number of assaults, grand larcenies, robberies, burglaries, violent felonies and misdemeanor crimes also plummeted to a new low under CompStat, securing Maple’s place in history as “the man who saved New York City.” By the late 1990s, Maple’s CompStat system was being utilized by police departments in major cities throughout the United States.
Maple left the NYPD after Bratton was forced out in 1996. During the Bratton team's tenure, murder plummeted 50% and overall crime dropped 39%. After leaving the NYPD, Maple became a crimefighting consultant to police departments from Newark to New Orleans. He also wrote the 1999 book “The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business," with journalist Chris Mitchell.
(Maple told the story of his effective campaign against cr...)
1999
Views
During his tenure with the Transit Police Department, Maple became tired of responding to crimes in the subway, instead of fighting them. So he went home and created several hundred maps on his wall. Fifty-five feet of maps that Maple called, “charts of the future,” that he used to map every “solved vs. unsolved” violent crime in every train, on every subway station in the city.
Maple interrogated his subordinates with style. Once, when an inspector was struggling through an explanation, he projected a Pinocchio image on a screen behind the inspector, using a light beam to make the figure's nose grow.
Quotations:
"Treat every case as if your mother was the victim."
Personality
In his homburg, two-tone spectator shoes and bow tie, Maple made a colorful and exuberant figure, a throwback to the more flamboyant police officers of earlier times, as he roamed the city's better-known nightspots, sipping the occasional Champagne on ice and telling stories of his zestful life.
Rumor has it that Jack Maple's flamboyant dress, style and attitude may have been influenced by the way he was kidded on how he resembled the actor Edward G. Robinson.
Physical Characteristics:
Maple was 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 220 pounds.
Quotes from others about the person
Jack was one of the truly great innovators in law enforcement who helped to make New York City the safest large city in America,'' said Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
“What a profound impact this one person, this one kid from Richmond Hill had on this community, on this city, on this country,” Councilman Eric Ulrich said.
“Those of you who did not know Jack and only hear stories about him really cannot understand how much we learned from him,” Bratton said.
The Commissioner said Maple was the “essence of a crime fighter,” a concerned citizen of New York City who worked tirelessly to keep his fellow New Yorkers safe.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani praised Maple as "one of the truly great innovators of law enforcement."
"Jack was certainly one of those people who believed New York City could be a better place, and he helped make it that way," said former Police Commissioner William Bratton. "He was a true hero of the city."
"Jack was a smasher of old ways, he would use humor, ridicule and self-effacement to get a point across and get somebody to believe in something," said Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, who worked with Maple in the NYPD.
Television journalist John Miller, the former NYPD spokesman under Bratton, said Maple “changed the way we live. He changed how we walk down the street and whether we decide to stay out late; whether or not we ride the subway or… go to a certain neighborhood.”
Connections
Jack was married twice and divorced twice. In 2001, he married Brigid O’Connor, his third wife. His proposal to Ms.O'Connor was vintage. Walking on Rockaway Beach, he kicked a bottle that turned out to have a drawing showing two figures greatly resembling the couple. ''But it's a huge beach,'' John Miller, another former deputy police commissioner and a close friend, protested at a party at Elaine's. ''How could you be sure you'd be able to walk her to where the bottle was?'' Mr. Maple replied, ''I scattered hundreds of them in the sand.''
Maple is survived by his wife; his daughters, Jacqueline and Breen, and a son, Brendan.
Jack's ''Compstat'' won an award from the Ford Foundation as an innovation in the American government and has been adopted in scores of other cities, including New Orleans, Newark, and Baltimore.
Jack's ''Compstat'' won an award from the Ford Foundation as an innovation in the American government and has been adopted in scores of other cities, including New Orleans, Newark, and Baltimore.