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ADDENDUM I
“In Character”
Dialing 311: How
Computers, Cops, and Creativity Reduce Crime (8)
When Rudolph Giuliani was first elected mayor of New York City in 1993,
the nation’s best and brightest, including most city dwellers, had written
off urban America.
After the Los Angeles and Crown Heights riots in 1992, it was generally
taken for granted that the inner city was no longer controllable and that
residents of inner cities could not be held to the same standards as
society at large. More than two thousand New Yorkers were murdered in
1990, an all-time high, and forty children were killed by stray gunfire in
the first six months of the year alone.
And where were the police when all this was going on? Largely confined to
their patrol cars, they merely responded to crimes that had already
occurred. And many “victimless crimes” didn’t even merit their response.
The “no car radio” signs on people’s windshields – notes written from
residents directly to the city’s thugs – emphasized how small a role the
police were playing. And the future seemed certain to offer more of the
same.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, long one of New York’s wise men, feared
that the illegitimacy rate rendered law enforcement an exercise in
futility, counseling that “the out-of-wedlock ratio in New York City today
[tells us] what the situation of teenagers in high school will be in
sixteen years’ time ... the next two decades are spoken for.... There is
nothing you’ll do of any consequence, except start the process of change.
Don’t expect it to take less than thirty years.” And no one expected that
a change in New York’s leadership would alter the situation. George Will
spoke for many conservatives when he dismissed Giuliani’s election as
“irrelevant.” The idea that a bloated government bureaucracy – no matter
who was in charge – could produce a drop of innovation or creativity
seemed laughable.
Looking back, it seems more than a little surprising that a country that
prides itself on innovation – our Founding Fathers were nothing if not
creative – and a city that has been at the center of intellectual,
business, and cultural life for so long, could have given up looking for
creative solutions to its problems so quickly. Indeed, it seems the
critics spoke too soon. Now, less than fifteen years after these
depressing pronouncements, crime in New York is at a forty-year low, and
such despair seems unthinkable as one walks through the growing number of
safe, vibrant, and increasingly wealthy neighborhoods all over the city.
How this change occurred is the story not of one man’s totalitarian
control of the city – as Giuliani’s administration was sometimes portrayed
– but rather of a set of new ideas about urban government, and the people,
the environment, and the technology that made their implementation
possible. Now these new ideas are being carried over into almost every
facet of city life, so that fifteen years hence we may recall the triumph
over crime as only the beginning of a new way of looking at and managing
cities.
The first of these ideas, now well-known, is the “broken windows” theory,
originally put forth by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the
Atlantic,
which argued that by stopping the small crimes that had long been
effectively decriminalized police could take the felons off the streets
and undo the disorder – the broken windows – at the same time. The idea of
cracking down on squeegee men (who wiped windshields of cars stopped at
traffic lights and then demanded payment from drivers) and fare-beaters in
the subways was mocked at the time. Why bother with minor infractions when
muggers and murderers were running free? But when it turned out that
nearly one in six fare-beaters was either carrying a weapon or was wanted
on an outstanding warrant, the new administration knew it was on the right
track.
Once the lowest-hanging fruit had been effectively picked, that is, once
the most brazen or stupid criminals had been caught, the administration
began to explore other ideas for controlling crime. They began with
looking at the crime statistics. Police Commissioner William Bratton
recalls, “As far as the department had been concerned, statistics were not
for use in combating crime, they were only for keeping score at the end of
the year. Even then, the only statistics they paid attention to were the
robberies. But even that was smoke and mirrors.... Nobody used them for
anything.” But suddenly, the same numbers that police officers, city
councilmen, mayors, and reporters had been staring at sadly for decades
became the key to solving the city’s crime problems.
The man who first looked at these numbers in a different, creative way was
deputy commissioner Jack Maple. One of those incredible New York
characters – he sported a bow tie, homburg, and spectator shoes – Maple
claims he first got the idea for COMPSTAT (computerized statistics) in
early 1994 while soaking up a few at Elaine’s, a tony East Side watering
hole.
Maple asked for all the criminal incidents for East New York, the
dangerous 75th precinct, to be mapped with push-pins. The information was
gradually entered into a computer system, which allowed map projections of
various kinds of crime to be superimposed on each other. “For the first
time,” notes police historian Eli Silverman, “all the crime and arrest
data that were floating in the vast NYPD universe were brought together.”
Like many innovative ideas, this seems like common sense in retrospect.
But at the time, when police spent most of their time simply responding to
emergency calls, and precincts’ passivity, territorialism, and distrust of
City Hall put a damper on the sharing and gathering of information, this
was ground-breaking stuff.
As with many creative ideas, COMPSTAT used old ideas in a new context.
Urban data-mapping has been around since at least 1854, when Dr. John Snow
mapped more than 500 cholera deaths in London and found that they
clustered around a single water pump. But no one had previously thought of
putting urban mapping to use in preventing crime. Moreover, New York was
relying on outdated technology. Once they began using computers, the data
could be mapped more quickly and efficiently.
But new information and new ways of looking at it could not be the whole
solution. The entire role of the police force in an urban environment had
to be reconsidered. Under previous city governments, many police had been
kept off the streets in order to reduce corruption. The more the police
were allowed to interact with lawbreakers, the logic went, the more
chances there were for officers to accept bribes to look the other way or
become involved in crime themselves. Police were also supposed to avoid
conflict as much as possible. After the Crown Heights riots in particular,
city authorities became more concerned with tamping down racial tensions
than with fighting crime.
The Giuliani administration changed the role of police in the city. At
what became the daily 8 a.m. COMPSTAT meeting, the previous day’s crime
statistics were given to the police department leadership. For the first
time, the precinct commanders could plan their daily operations on the
basis of up-to-the-minute crime information sorted by category of crime
and mapped out block by block. Suddenly the job of the police was to
prevent crimes, not just respond to them. Specifically, COMPSTAT gave the
NYPD the ability to overcome a problem called “displacement.” When the
Tactical Narcotics Teams had performed raids in previous years, criminals
just moved over a few blocks. With accurate and instantaneous mapping,
open-air drug markets were broken up over and over until they either dried
up or were driven indoors where they did less damage. And when the data
showed that drug crime and gun crime existed in overlapping geographic
areas, drug units were replaced with Street Narcotics and Gun Units that
ran round-the-clock buy and bust operations. Suddenly, the statistic each
precinct was concerned with was not the number of minutes it took to
respond to a crime, but the number of “collars” they made per day.
COMPSTAT also changed the relationship between the precinct commanders and
the brass, breaking through the traditionally rigid layers of authority.
The effect, as one Brooklyn precinct commander put it, was that “we,”
meaning the rank-and-file and the department leadership, “are more and
more on the same wavelength.” But it also put the precinct commanders in a
tough spot. If there had been a surge in muggings or burglaries on a
particular block, they were expected to analyze the problem and explain
what they intended to do about it. If they didn’t solve the problem in a
timely fashion, it was their jobs on the line.
As Professor Eli Silverman, in his article “NYPD Battles Crime, Innovative
Strategies in Policing,” explains, “The top of the chain was demanding
that precinct commanders finally take ownership of crime control – an idea
that became central to the COMPSTAT meetings – and the commanders, their
feet to the fire, were instilling that same idea in their men on the
street.” Louis Anemone, then-chief-of-patrol, recalls his delight in
hearing one commander report, “I have four robberies.” Before COMPSTAT,
apparently, most precinct commanders didn’t use the first-person pronoun
in reporting crime statistics.
The results of these innovations in city governance were remarkable. In
1994 crime dropped by 12 percent, followed by 16 percent declines in 1995
and 1996. The biggest declines came in the hardest-hit neighborhoods,
mostly in the outer boroughs. And fear seemed to decline even more rapidly
than crime. Just as the belief in the intractability of the city’s
problems encouraged despair among law-abiding people, the creative
solutions to urban problems begot a certain optimism among the city’s
population. The change was palpable. A virtuous (as opposed to vicious)
cycle was set in motion, in which law-abiding people spent more time in
public places, and, as good uses of public space drove out bad, more
people were drawn back into the public life of the city.
Time,
whose 1990 cover story “The Rotting of the Big Apple” had generated
enormous dismay, trumpeted the change by placing Bratton on a 1995 cover.
As murder rates plunged to a twenty-five-year low in the first half of
1995, New
York
proclaimed “The End of Crime As We Know It.”
Though he didn’t believe that crime would disappear entirely, Bratton
realized it was possible for creative ideas to change behavior, something
the city’s detractors, and even people like Senator Moynihan, had doubted.
That meant 163,428 fewer felonies between the start of 1994 and the end of
1996, a year that saw the city’s lowest number of crime complaints in more
than a quarter century. The big crime, murder, dropped 16 percent in 1996
and had already fallen by nearly half since 1993.
.....
The problems of an urban environment, though, are hardly solved. And
COMPSTAT is now being understood as an evolving and expanding tool.
“COMPSTAT has changed over the years,” says Detective Walter Burns, a
spokesman for the New York City Police Department. “We’ve added different
elements. The original concept was just dealing with precinct commanders.
But one would come in and say, ‘My problem is narcotics and I don’t have a
narcotics group. So bring narcotics into COMPSTAT.’ One says, ‘I’m having
a big problem with kids stealing cars.’ Now auto theft is part of COMPSTAT.”
And there’s no reason the COMPSTAT system and the ethos of accountability
that goes with it should apply only to crime numbers. New York now has, in
order of their introduction, TRAFFICSTAT (also run by the police), TEAMS
(Total Efficiency Accountability Management System – a prison governance
system which led to the infamously brutal Rikers Island becoming the
safest prison facility in the nation, according to a report by the
Rockefeller Foundation), and PARKSTAT, which rates public parks for
cleanliness and safety, and features monthly COMPSTAT-like meetings. The
percentage of parks in New York rated acceptably clean and safe by the
department rose from 47 percent in 1993 to 86 percent in 2001. Finally, in
August 2001, the Giuliani administration announced the Citywide
Accountability Program (CAPSTAT), which required all city agencies to
develop programs that implement the essential elements of COMPSTAT. The
agencies must collect data about their work and hold regular meetings with
managers to find solutions to the problems revealed by the data.
And now the idea has spread across the country. By 2000, a third of the
country’s 515- largest police departments had implemented a COMPSTAT-like
program, according to a Police Foundation study. Bratton, now chief of the
Los Angeles Police Department, has taken COMPSTAT west with him,
instituting it in America’s second-largest city last fall.
“That’s an amazing diffusion of innovation,” says David Weisburd, the lead
investigator of the study. “I compared it to diffusion rates of the
fastest growing innovations, agricultural innovations, and social
innovations like birth control. Most innovations take a very long time to
spread. This one, in comparison, was extremely fast.” The researchers at
the Police Foundation believe that COMPSTAT’s popularity came from its
top-down model of authority. “COMPSTAT emphasizes putting pressure on
commanders,” Weisburd says. “The drama occurs with the higher-ups.”
Like their colleagues in New York, officials in other cities have created
COMPSTATs for other problems – or combinations of problems. Baltimore,
Maryland, has implemented a CITISTAT system that tracks city government as
a whole. City agencies provide regular data about their work to a central
office that analyzes the data and creates reports for the mayor. “The
charts, maps, and pictures tell a story of performance, and those managers
are held accountable,” explains Matt Gallagher, director of operations for
CITISTAT. Since the program was implemented, Baltimore has experienced a
40 percent reduction in payroll overtime, saving the city $15 million over
two years, while taking on such indicators of urban blight as graffiti and
abandoned vehicles. But the idea itself is not enough. The consistency of
the statistics and the extent to which managers are held accountable are
the keys to ensuring the success of these programs, which is why other
cities have yet to experience the same level of success as New York. “The
managers have to feel top management is serious about it,” Silverman says,
and management has to stick to it.
And the system itself is far from perfect. Even COMPSTAT’s most ardent
proponents concede that these programs do have some downsides. “What is
not counted tends to be discounted,” wrote Dennis Smith and William
Bratton in a Rockefeller Institute Report. Commanders tend to overlook
other indicators of police performance, such as civilian complaints and
patterns of police misconduct, including too-aggressive policing and a
lack of respect for citizens. Sidney L. Harring, a professor of law at
City University of New York Law School, and Gerda W. Ray of the University
of Missouri, St. Louis, wrote in 1999 that as the police strove to
increase arrests they did not keep track of how many people they stopped
and frisked on city streets. “That all of this scientifically structured,
aggressive police work could be pulled off without even the most
rudimentary data about its result reveals the hollow core of the social
scientific foundation of New York City’s highly managed policing. COMPSTAT
is no better than its flawed database,” Harring and Ray noted. Indeed
tracking systems are only as good as the numbers that guide them. There’s
a temptation for commanders feeling the heat to downgrade felonies to
misdemeanors, making the crime rate in the area appear lower than it
really was. Since COMPSTAT went into effect, “at least five police
commanders have been accused of reclassifying crimes to improve their
statistics, which are reviewed at sometimes contentious weekly COMPSTAT
meetings,” William K. Rashbaum reported in the
New York Times.
Despite these difficulties, there are some who see potential for COMPSTAT
beyond the local level.
City Journal
writer Heather MacDonald has argued that we need a federal version of
COMPSTAT to monitor terrorist investigations. “The NYPD, for instance,
could target enforcement activities on suspected terrorist groups and then
apply the strategy that worked so well for street crime: treat every
arrest as an opportunity to get information about other crimes.... Even
New York’s Human Resources Administration – which has discovered 10,000
fugitive felons, including twelve murderers, on its welfare rolls, since
it began cross-checking recipients’ fingerprints against a national
database of outstanding warrants – should check recipients against
Interpol terrorist data too.”
.....
When Mike Bloomberg succeeded Rudy Giuliani as mayor in 2001, many voters
were hoping he could simply ensure that these new policies would stay in
place and help the city maintain its new safe environment. But Bloomberg,
who made his fortune managing and presenting financial data on his
ubiquitous and eponymous Bloomberg terminals, actually hit upon another
creative idea, 311, a citywide number for all non-emergency calls that
provides services and information while at the same time vastly increasing
the city’s store of knowledge.
Prior to 311, most non-emergency calls were taken by the misleadingly
named Mayor’s Action Center, headed by Fletcher Vredenburgh, who first
came to public attention when he posted an essay online declaring that he
was sick of “griping, often whining, often stupid New Yorkers ... dumb
f---s from the public to dumber f---s that work for the city. I’ve had two
cases where cops took in cars that had been stolen and then were at a loss
to even give a hint to their owners about where they might be. Every day
someone gets thrown off welfare improperly because an imbecilic caseworker
can’t tell her ass from a hole in the wall ...” He concluded: “So I take
painkillers, sleep a lot, and think about killing every citizen and
employee of New York City every minute I’m awake.”
Vredenburgh’s outburst was over the top, but doubtless many New Yorkers
felt the same way about calling in for help as he did in receiving their
calls. As recently as 2003, New York City had more than forty call centers
employing over 800 employees, not to mention automated lines. Many of the
operators worked on hopelessly outdated computers, while others relied on
a fourteen-page phone book of city services with more than 4,000 entries.
In fact, many callers grew so frustrated with the city’s information
centers that they called 911 to get their questions about garbage pickup
answered, thereby creating enormous problems for the city’s emergency
service operators. “There are 11 pages of listings in the phone book under
New York City,” said Mayor Bloomberg, as he shepherded the $13.1 million
311 center through in the midst of budget cuts. 311 is now staffed by 200
workers handling over 10,000 calls daily. Operators who take seven weeks
of training in phone manners, computer skills, and the city’s geography
offer services in 170 different languages.
But New York’s 311 system did far more than create a single clearinghouse
for non-emergency city services and information. It also provided the city
with an unprecedented array of data that, in conjunction with the other
departmental statistics gathered, creates an innovative way to monitor and
demand efficient results.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. 311 may prove an even bigger
civic innovation than COMPSTAT. The city learns from each problem reported
to 311 – it knows which blocks have graffiti problems and which landlords
won’t turn on the heat – which perhaps is why the mayor himself frequently
calls in to report potholes and other such problems. 311 extends the
city’s grasp of itself, adding millions of observers to its information
network.
There are still kinks to be ironed out. The city continues to misrepresent
311 as a simpler way to get your problems solved. But the same
unresponsive city agencies are on the other end of a lot of these calls.
If you make a justified complaint to the Department of Environmental
Protection, for instance, it’ll still take them a week to get there.
What finally elevates New York’s 311 system over other cities’ is that
while it helps keep 911 clear for emergency calls, like Baltimore’s, and
performs constituent services, like Chicago’s, it is also integrated into
CAPSTAT, so that instead of being a reactive system (like 911, which is
predicated on a crime happening before the police respond), it can handle
problems before they become emergencies, or even major hassles. And the
numbers it generates are an incentive for the mayor to keep service levels
up, problems down, and response times short, and for city managers to stop
trouble before it happens.
New York’s 311 is not a new solution to an old problem so much as an
entirely new paradigm, a new form of urban introspection. As Johnson has
it, “the government learns as much as the callers do. That’s the radical
idea at the heart of the service: Every question or problem carries its
own kind of data.” As the city continues to examine itself in previously
unthinkable ways, suddenly the problems of urban living don’t seem so
intractable. Maybe creative solutions to the difficulties of governing
didn’t end with the Constitutional Convention.
.....
Fred Siegel is the author of
The Prince of the City:
Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life
from Encounter Press. Harry Siegel, the editor-in-chief of
New Partisan,
is writing a book on gentrification in New York.
**Above information
cited from Reference 8
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