[MUSIC] My name is Dennis Smith and I've been on the faculty here at the Robert F Wagner Graduate School of Public Service for a very long time. Going back to before the fiscal crisis in the 1970s, and through now. I have followed the police of New York with great interest. At the start of that administration,the mayor and the police commissioner held a press conference and announced that in the following year, 1994, crime was gonna come down, they said, 10%. Well crime had been going up for more than a decade. It had started to come down a little bit under Dinkins with community pleasing, a little bit. But not 10% a year, certainly not 10% a year. So, a lot of people in my field in criminology and policy criminology. What are they smoking? They're bragging, they're full of themselves, there's no way they're gonna bring crime down 10%. And they had experts in our field. People like James Q Wilson, who wrote a very pioneering book on police called Varieties of Police Behavior or David Bailey, at SUNY in Albany, one of the criminal justice people who study police, wonderful studies of police. He wrote a wonderful book in 1994, Police Are the Future, in which he argued that the idea that the police can bring down crime is a myth. 1994, the idea that police can bring down crime is a myth. They have no known technology for doing that. They can be argued really only be expected to respond effectively to crime. Come take good reports, follow up and investigate, try to find the perpetrator, make an arrest, prosecute them successfully respond to crime. When Bratton came in, as a new police commissioner in New York, he had a very different view. He thought that the police, going back to the time of Robert Peel, founded the police in London, had a responsibility, there mission in fact was to prevent crime disorder not just respond to it but to prevent it. And he believed they could do it and he believed he had done it on our subways system. And so, he came in sort of primed in a different direction and I think when people talk about what happened in New York they often forget that that fundamental change in mission from a focus on responding to a problem to trying to prevent the problem was one of the most important things that happened. And it was a big change for the officers in the police department he had to sort of instill in them a very different idea about what their job was. Imagine under the old system of policing in place, we're people who are rewarded for responding to crime and officers that promote it for making arrests. Arrests were one of the major statistics, but, clearly, arrest is reactive. Anytime you make an arrest really is after a crime has been committed, a person's been victimized. Precinct commanders typically in New York City, had an area and a population they were serving. That was bigger than most of those suburban departments with their own police chief and their own police board and all that kinda, every precinct in New York was bigger than most of those suburban precinct departments. But, under the old system most of their officers time was not directed by the precinct commander, but by operators, central operators getting calls, ten million calls a year dispatching five million cars a year to go to people who had said police I need you. And they could be needing it for lots of different things and we were measuring how rapidly respond to all these calls to 911 on average and beating up on the police department if it didn't come quickly when called and if the response time on average went up 40 seconds it was news story. Even though when you look at it in reasonable perspective of systematic management analysis. Out of the 600,000 crimes that were reported, serious crimes reported in 1990, Huge volumes of those clients are things like auto thefts and burglary. Neither of those doesn't make any difference, really, how quickly the police come. So if you're giving average response time, they sooner dominate the average. If you only have 2,200 homicides, which is an extraordinarily large number, our biggest number 2,243 or something like that in 1990. Huge number but it's a miniscule fraction of 600,000 serious crimes in New York. So no matter how fast you respond to violent crimes in progress. Its not gonna shape the average the way your response to burglary and auto theft reports does. So we were going to great lengths to measure and pressure performance around a measure that didn't matter much. When Bratton came in, and put his focus on crime reduction he basically said to precinct commanders, you're my field leaders, you're my field commanders. I wanna support you, I wanna work with you to figure out what your crime problems are. Remembering again that New York City is very diverse, and the crime problems of one precinct could be very different from another. And we're gonna figure out which of the precincts have the biggest crime problems, and they're gonna get most of our attention. And we're gonna figure out within those precincts, what's the biggest crime problems and those biggest crime problems are gonna get most of our attention. So we're gonna be setting priorities. It's not gonna be random patrol. It's not gonna be random distribution of resources. It's gonna be more targeted crime strategies. And so they developed a number of crime strategies for different kinds of crimes and they communicated this to every precinct commander and those precinct commanders were expected to communicate it to their lieutenants and their sergeants at role call and to diffuse this sort of new set of priorities within the department. Within the first year crime was down I think 12% the first year, the next year another 17%. No place in American crime came down 29% in two years. It was just phenomenal. So one of the things that happened is police leaders from all over America flocked to New York to learn about CompStat, the system of using comparative statistics, comparative meaning comparing precincts, comparing trends over time, comparing different kinds of crimes, that whole approach, now called so CompStat is the code for it. Got a lot of attention from police officials around the country and ultimately around the world, we've had a lot of officials from around the world have come to look at this. The violent crime in New York City has been affected extraordinarily by police management reform in New York City. The numbers are also pretty soon I'm giving you this chart. But people would start to say, well, it's gone down in other places in the country and the world. But in this country, for example, auto theft is down 53% in the country. But people say, well cars were made pretty difficult to steal. That's probably true. It's down 53% in the country, it's down 92% as of 2011. I think it's down 94% now. So it's almost twice down twice as much in New York as it is down in the rest of the country. In terms of forcible rape, in the country vessel rate is down 14%, in New York City it's down 68%. Something in terms of public management I believe, happened here that's really distinctive and impressive. The shift to measuring, which was part of public management, the shift to measuring outcome, results. When they started talking about results in the public management it was pretty much a synonym for outcome measurement. I think that that is here to stay. And I, it's so deeply embedded, at least in the United States, in the funding, the cultural funding. Philanthropies are asking non-profits for evidence results. Budget agencies are asking agencies for evidence result. When officials went in to Michael Bloomberg as mayor and said I have this reform proposal, I've changed how I do homeless policy or something, he invariably said well how are we gonna know whether this is working or not. When he introduced certain innovations in his effort to reduce poverty in New York City, to test my knowledge, every one of them, he independently got foundations or he had his own foundation, funded systematic evaluations of those innovations like conditional cash transfers to try to reduce poverty. That I think is here to stay. With all of its problems. What I think will happen over time is we will work hard to solve the problems. Not good enough managers, measures that are easily distorted, measures that are misleading. It's relatively new. That we are carefully and broadly measuring performance the way we are. I think increasingly people will recognize that part of performance measurement management is systematic thinking about performance. And to me that means some version policy makers and managers developing and having reference to, on a regular basis, what we call logic models or theories of change. Something that was originally developed in evaluation literature. People like Carol Weiss who produced the idea that evaluators should map out the logic of a program or policy so they can evaluate it. So they can trace the effects from one variable to another. In my work, and in the field of evidence management, we've increasingly imported that idea, the utility of a logic model, or what foundations sometimes call theories of change. What are your assumptions? Be explicit about your assumptions about, how what you're doing, your activities, are expected to lead to the results that your mission says you're trying to accomplish. I think the future that's been, that aspect has been not as fully developed into public management practice as it should've been. It's kinda like what I said earlier about New York city adopted the Mayors Management Report which is supposed to be the mayor's planning management and reporting system, but because the report part is the part is mandated by the charter, it's the only part that regularly got attention. The other parts about planning and managing this performance data tended to ebb and flow or be neglected. I think that new public management is going to have to include as part of how it trains, how people are trained for it, how they use it in practice, this systematic thinking about their assumptions, about how they are gonna produce what it is they produce. If they do that, when they do that, from every place I've looked at it there are impressive positive results. So.
