NYC Police Department

NYC police department, which just reported another incredible year of successfully fighting crime (see: http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577127092122364090.html).  In my 2005 article (linked to above), I wrote:

I want to highlight another interesting model: the reform of the New York City police department over the past decade or so. I recognize that this might be a controversial example for some, given the horrifying stories of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, but the fact is that the NYPD, as a crime-fighting force, has transformed itself -- and this transformation is a major reason why New York City has gone from the murder capital of the country to being one of the safest cities in America. At the peak in 1990, 2,245 murders took place in the city; last year, the number had plunged 75% to only 571, the lowest level in 41 years. New York City's murder rate of 6.9 per 100,000 people is the lowest of any large U.S. city. As a Big Apple resident myself, this is indeed cause for celebration.

As recently as 1994, the NYPD was a politicized, patronage- and corruption-filled, unaccountable bureaucracy, with an enormous budget, tens of thousands of employees, and a powerful union representing them. What bureaucracy do these exact words describe today? Why, the public school system in most large cities. If the NYPD could be reformed so dramatically, I am convinced that public school or corporate bureaucracies can be as well. But how?

Here's what I wrote in September (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/09/lessons-from-compstat-for-our-schools.html):

I'm convinced that there's a tremendous amount that can be learned from the COMPSTAT approach to crime fighting that was pioneered in NYC (with astonishing success; murders, for example fell 76.3% from 1990-2010 and serious crimes fell 80.0%; see http://nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf) and then spread elsewhere.  The description on Wikepedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat) says, "CompStat is a management philosophy or organizational management tool for police departments, roughly equivalent to Six Sigma or TQM, and is not a computer system or software package."  COMPSTAT has six core elements according to this 99-page report by the Police Foundation (www.policefoundation.org/pdf/compstatinpractice.pdf):

1.      Mission clarification: Top management is responsible for clarifying and exalting the core features of the department's mission that serve as the overarching reason for the organization's existence. Mission clarification includes a demonstration of management's commitment and states its goals in specific terms for which the organization and its leaders can be held accountable—such as reducing crime by 10 percent in a year (Bratton 1998, 252).

2.      Internal accountability: Operational commanders are held accountable for knowing their commands, being well acquainted with the problems in the command, and accomplishing measurable results in reducing those problems—or at least demonstrating a diligent effort to learn from that experience.

3.      Geographic organization of operational command: Operational command is focused on the policing of territories, so central decision-making authority over police operations is delegated to commanders with territorial responsibility for districts. Functionally differentiated units and specialists—patrol, community-policing officers, detectives, narcotics, vice, juvenile, and traffic—are either placed under the command of the district commander, or arrangements are made to facilitate their responsiveness to the commander's needs.

4.      Organizational flexibility: The organization develops the capacity and habit of changing established routines as needed to mobilize resources when and where they are needed for strategic application.

5.      Data-driven analysis of problems and assessment of department's problem-solving efforts: Data are made available to identify and analyze problems and to track and assess the department's response. Data are made accessible to all relevant personnel on a timely basis and in a readily usable format.

6.      Innovative problem-solving tactics: Police responses are selected because they offer the best prospects of success, not because they are "what we have always done." Innovation and experimentation are encouraged and use of the best available knowledge about practices is expected.

Let's substitute the words "below-basic readers" for "crime" and see what COMPSTAT would look like as implemented in our schools – I barely had to change a thing:

1.      Mission clarification: Top management (the superintendent, mayor, school board, city council) is responsible for clarifying and exalting the core features of the department's mission that serve as the overarching reason for the organization's existence. Mission clarification includes a demonstration of management's commitment and states its goals in specific terms for which the organization and its leaders can be held accountable—such as reducing the number of below-basic readers by 10 percent per year.

2.      Internal accountability: Operational commanders (principals) are held accountable for knowing their schools, being well acquainted with the problems in their schools, and accomplishing measurable results in reducing those problems—or at least demonstrating a diligent effort to learn from that experience.

3.      Geographic organization of operational command: Operational command is focused on the running of high-quality, so central decision-making authority over school operations is delegated to principals with responsibility for their schools. Functionally differentiated units and specialists—assistant principals, regular teachers, reading specialists, social workers—are placed under the command of the principal.

4.      Organizational flexibility: The organization develops the capacity and habit of changing established routines as needed to mobilize resources when and where they are needed for strategic application.

5.      Data-driven analysis of problems and assessment of department's problem-solving efforts: Data are made available to identify and analyze problems and to track and assess the school's response. Data are made accessible to all relevant personnel on a timely basis and in a readily usable format.

6.      Innovative problem-solving tactics: Educators' responses are selected because they offer the best prospects of success, not because they are "what we have always done." Innovation and experimentation are encouraged and use of the best available knowledge about practices is expected.

This reinforces to me that the basics of reforming our schools aren't rocket science – it's Management 101 – but the devil is in the details.  It's really hard to come up with a fair evaluation system for teachers and principals, for example.  But I don't think that one of the key elements of COMPSTAT would be so hard to replicate: imagine in every city in this country that every week the superintendent would meet with all of the principals in the city (or a particular district).  As part of these meetings, a few principals would present the data for their schools – put up on a screen behind them – and would not be allowed to say, "Hey, the fact that half of the children in my school can't read isn't my fault.  They're poor kids from broken families, so how can we be expected to educate them?" 

No, they would be expected to have a plan to reduce illiteracy (or violence, or whatever particularly acute problem the school faced) and EXECUTE on it!  They key is that this isn't punitive and meant to embarrass anyone, but rather to create accountability, stimulate thinking and, importantly, share best practices.  But let's be clear, there's a very punitive element of this: if a principal's school doesn't show progress after a reasonable amount of time, then a new principal is brought in (in the first two years of COMPSTAT, TWO-THIRDS of precinct commanders in NYC were replaced).

And here's what I wrote in another email in September (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-new-york-beat-crime.html):

I enjoyed this to-the-point article about "How New York Beat Crime" and include it here because, as I've written many times before, I think the best highly-successful road map for how to fix our schools isn't Finland, a tiny country that looks nothing like ours (though we can learn much from Finland, to be sure), but the revolutionary transformation of the NYC police department and the stunning drop in crime over the past two decades.  Here's the conclusion to the article, and below is an email I sent out earlier this year:

Perhaps the most optimistic lesson to take from New York's experience is that high rates of homicides and muggings are not hardwired into a city's populations, cultures and institutions. The steady, significant and cumulatively overwhelming crime decline in New York is proof that cities as we know them need not be incubators of robbery, rape and mayhem. Moreover, it demonstrates that the environment in which people are raised does not doom them to a lifetime outside the law—and that neither do their genes. That result is a fundamental surprise to many students of the American city and is the most hopeful insight of criminological science in a century.

Here's my email:

Ravitch Article Response

http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/07/ravitch-article-response.html

I want to comment on two things Ravitch said in this article.  First:

…It's the argument Ravitch has been making for a year. "They're not shoe stores that you can close and move to a different mall," she said during a panel debate afterwards. "We don't close the firehouse if there are more fires in the neighborhood. We don't close the police station if there is more crime in the neighborhood." Instead, singing from the liberal hymnal, she argued for policies to address the poverty-related "root causes" of academic failure.

These are EXACTLY the same insanely stupid arguments that were used to excuse police departments when crime was rampant.  It's hard to remember those days, but prevalent at that time was the now-discredited theory that crime was the inevitable consequence of poverty, our racist society, etc., and therefore the police could only be excepted to sit in their station houses and respond to 911 calls – mostly to come pick up the bodies.

Since then, in NYC (which I've studied most closely), the murder rate is down by an astonishing 80%.  Yes, there have been some external factors that have contributed to this decline like the passing of the crack epidemic, but the overwhelming evidence is that more effective policing has made a HUGE impact.  When Giuliani and Bratton set out to reform the NYC police department 17 years ago (which at the time was as bureaucratic, dysfunctional, and ineffective as wide swaths of NYC's school system remain today), they pushed power down to the precinct level and then held precinct commanders accountable.  Guess what the turnover was within the first two years?  TWO-THIRDS of the precinct commanders didn't cut it.  But this was great news, as younger, more competent, go-getters were promoted.  Concurrent with this was the greater use of data (Compstat) and range of other measures – plus a critical culture shift.  Basically, the entire philosophy of policing was turned upside down: at every level of the police department, data was collected and the police were expected to impact it – namely, to REDUCE CRIME!  It sounds so obvious, but it was revolutionary back then – and, of course, there were plenty of nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done, it wasn't fair to officers to hold them accountable when they couldn't do anything about poverty, there would be cheating (and there was some, to be sure), etc. 

Under Bloomberg and Klein, the same philosophical and operational transformation was begun, but it still hasn't taken root throughout the system so much more work needs to be done…