City to Honor NYPD Legend Jack Maple with Richmond Hill Street Co-Naming

Queens is set to crown The Jackster.

On Monday, Sept. 21, city leaders and the Richmond Hill community will honor one of the most recognizable and impactful figures in the renowned 170-year history of the New York Police Department when it co-names 108^th Street and Park Lane South “Jack Maple Place.”John Edward “Jack” Maple, who retired from the department as deputy commissioner for Crime Control Strategies, served in the first Bill Bratton NYPD administration (1994-’96). He is widely credited with creating and developing what is now known as CompStat, the crucial law-enforcement strategy tool the NYPD uses to track patterns and proactively fight crime.

Last year, the CompStat room at 1 Police Plaza was renamed the Jack Maple Compstat Center.

“A visionary, an innovator and a great police leader, Jack Maple changed the face of policing in New York and America,” Police Commissioner Bratton said. “In a time when conventional wisdom proclaimed that police could not affect crime, Jack Maple knew better and proved it wrong. His vision of a safe city is our reality today.”

Legendary police reporter Leonard Levitt told The Forum that it wasn’t just the homburg hats, bow ties, and two-toned shoes that made the man who liked to call himself The Jackster stand out above the fray.

“He was a true original and iconoclast. He lived and breathed the Police Department, and lived for fighting crime and the bad guys,” Levitt said of Maple, who died of colon cancer in 2001 at the age of 48. “Losing him at such an early age was tragic not only for him and his family but for the citizens of New York City.”

The son of a postal worker and a nurse, Maple attended Brooklyn Technical High School, but dropped out before his senior year to sign on as a trainee with the Transit Police. He would eventually get his General Educational Development diploma.

At 27, Maple became the youngest detective in the Transit Department, according to The New York Times. It was at Transit that Maple and Bill Bratton crossed paths, when the latter was named chief of the force in 1990. And it was during their time together at Transit that Maple would show Bratton his colored push-pin-based crime mapping system—the rudimentary predecessor to the computer-generated CompStat of today.

In his book, “NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force,” Levitt characterized Maple as an outsider who had been “brought in with a mandate that was nothing less than to change the way the NYPD did business.”

His revolutionary mapping strategy did just that.

In true outsider fashion, “Maple,” Levitt wrote, “had jotted down his four CompStat precepts—accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment of forces, effective tactics, and relentless follow-through—on a napkin at Elaine’s,” the now-shuttered Upper East Side bar and restaurant that attracted prominent New Yorkers.

But Jack Maple’s department legacy isn’t simply patterns and numbers. It’s also working tours at the 75^th Precinct in Brooklyn. His son, Brendan, 25, graduated from the Police Academy in July.