The objective if "community policing" was to strengthen cooperation, communication, and partnership between police, city officials, and private “stakeholders” like real estate developers and businesses. In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office used data collected in part from the LAPD to promote the "co-implementation" of Compstat and community policing, calling them both "powerful engines of police reform."

Compstat is a data system that generates regular summaries of what a police department is doing. These summaries are reviewed at meetings where police leadership determine policing strategies and priorities. Compstat helped organize “broken windows” policing. George Kelling, who popularized “broken windows” policing, once called Compstat “the most important administrative policing development of the past 100 years.” Compstat also furthered the collection and legitimization of crime data, treating it as scientific fact rather than a reflection of racist and subjective enforcement choices of police. LAPD police chief Bill Bratton’s confederation of Compstat and “broken windows” policing also laid the groundwork for expansion of behavioral surveillance, which refers to police practices of speculatively monitoring behaviors that may be indicative of future crime. This kind of intelligence-gathering, according to Bratton, is “what police have always done, to observe and identify changing patterns of behavior.”