Recognizing Public Value

Mark H. Moore

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674071377
• Sujet: Politique et relations internationales
• Sous-sujet: Affaires publiques et administration

Mark H. Moore's now classic Creating Public Value offered advice to public managers about how to create public value. But that book left a key question unresolved: how could one recognize (in an accounting sense) when public value had been created? Here, Moore closes the gap by setting forth a philosophy of performance measurement that will help public managers name, observe, and sometimes count the value they produce, whether in education, public health, safety, crime prevention, housing, or other areas. Blending case studies with theory, he argues that private sector models built on customer satisfaction and the bottom line cannot be transferred to government agencies. The Public Value Account (PVA), which Moore develops as an alternative, outlines the values that citizens want to see produced by, and reflected in, agency operations. These include the achievement of collectively defined missions, the fairness with which agencies operate, and the satisfaction of clients and other stake-holders.But strategic public managers also have to imagine and execute strategies that sustain or increase the value they create into the future. To help public managers with that task, Moore offers a Public Value Scorecard that focuses on the actions necessary to build legitimacy and support for the envisioned value, and on the innovations that have to be made in existing operational capacity.Using his scorecard, Moore evaluates the real-world management strategies of such former public managers as D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Revenue John James.

1

William Bratton and the New York City Police Department

The Challenge of Defining and Recognizing Public Value

William Bratton and the Origin of Compstat

In November 1993 New York City’s citizens went to the polls to elect a mayor.¹ The incumbent, David Dinkins, touted his record in reducing crime, citing Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime reports showing a 15 percent decrease in major crimes. His opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, expressed skepticism, asserting that citizens were simply too demoralized to report crime. Giuliani believed the police were demoralized as well. Experts acknowledged that Dinkins had enjoyed at least a small decrease in crime during his run as mayor but played down the significance of short-term trends and noted that drug-related crime remained as problematic as it had been before Dinkins’s election, at the height of the crack epidemic in 1989.² In polls, more than half of the city’s citizens found the city less safe than they had four years earlier, and 50 percent had seen people selling drugs in their neighborhood, up from 38 percent in June 1990.³

Giuliani’s stance on crime helped secure him a narrow victory, and soon after his transition team invited William Bratton to interview for the post of police commissioner. Bratton, the former head of the New York City Transit Police and the Boston Police Department, carefully pitched his presentation to appeal to the mayor-elect: he expounded upon his belief in the “broken windows” theory of crime control, which held that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked” and encouraged police to enforce laws against petty crimes like aggressive panhandling and public drinking in order to minimize conditions thought to foster more serious crimes.⁴ He also outlined his plan to “motivate, equip, and energize” the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Audaciously, Bratton predicted his plan would reduce violent crime in New York by 40 percent in three years, with a 10 percent reduction in crime in the first year alone. On December 2, 1993, Giuliani selected Bratton to be New York City’s next police commissioner.

Getting Started

Upon his appointment, Bratton set up a transition team to evaluate the condition of the department and develop a game plan for reinvigorating it. Jack Maple, who had worked with Bratton at the New York City Transit Police and in Boston (and who would soon become Bratton’s deputy commissioner for crime control strategies), met with a small group of police officers, consultants, and other longtime Bratton advisers to vet the department for talent. Bratton wanted to appoint people who shared his focus on meeting ambitious crime reduction goals. He and his team asked all job candidates how much they believed the NYPD could reduce the crime rate. Those who envisioned a “two or three percent” reduction were summarily dropped from consideration.⁵ “Nowhere was [the department] prepared to deal with the idea that you could literally manage the crime problem rather than just respond to it,” said Bratton. The department that Bratton and his transition team found was more focused on avoiding major corruption scandals than on reducing crime, disorder, and fear by policing the streets and enforcing civilized norms of public behavior.⁶

When Bratton arrived in 1994, the NYPD had approximately thirty thousand officers. Over the next four years, the department grew substantially, in part due to a “Safe Streets, Safe City” law that imposed a small, citywide income-tax surcharge to pay for some six thousand new police officers.

Each precinct commander supervised between two hundred and four hundred officers, responsible for policing a hundred thousand-person segment of the city. But these “commanders” had relatively limited discretionary authority to go with their responsibility. Headquarters (HQ) determined staffing and deployment; detectives who worked out of precinct houses reported to the detective bureau at HQ; vice and narcotics operations required authorization from the Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB). In addition, an organizational layer of “divisional commanders” separated precinct commanders from the eight patrol borough commanders, from the commissioner, and from one another.⁷

In early 1994 John Linder, another former colleague of Bratton’s from the New York City Transit Police, carried out a “cultural diagnostic” of the NYPD to identify institutional values and to ascertain the extent to which the department’s priorities matched Bratton’s.⁸ Detailed surveys asked officers to rank which of their functions their superiors valued most. The officers listed “writing summonses” as the activity they believed their superiors valued most, followed by “holding down overtime,” “staying out of trouble,” “clearing backlog of radio runs,” “reporting police corruption,” and “treating bosses with deference.” The function that officers believed their superiors valued least was “reducing crime, disorder, and fear.”

When asked which activities officers themselves considered most important, they cited, in order: “reducing crime, disorder, and fear”; “making gun arrests”; “providing police services to people who requested them”; “gaining public confidence in police integrity”; “arresting drug dealers”; “correcting quality-of-life conditions”; and “staying out of trouble.” The rank and file appeared to share Bratton’s and Giuliani’s goals, but the department’s hierarchy seemed disorganized and paralyzed by a fear of corruption.

Bratton made John Timoney—a one-star chief who had headed up the office of management, analysis, and planning under former police commissioner Ray Kelly—chief of department, the NYPD’s highest uniformed officer, passing over sixteen higher-ranking officers. Timoney was seen, in the words of John Miller, Bratton’s deputy commissioner for public information, as someone “with a hotline to the cops’ mentality,” as well as encyclopedic knowledge of the NYPD. Louis Anemone, Kelly’s head of the disorders control unit, was made chief of patrol. “Anemone was clearly a field general,” said Miller. “He would be our Patton.” On January 24, 1994, just four days after Bratton had made Timoney the chief of department, at Timoney’s recommendation (and with City Hall’s support), Bratton replaced four of the NYPD’s five “superchiefs,” the four-star officers who run the department’s various operational units. The event was dubbed “Bloody Friday.”

Though overall goals and strategy would be set at headquarters, Bratton gave precinct commanders significantly more discretion over ground operations so that they could devise and implement their own crime-reduction strategies. In the past these personnel had been prohibited from engaging in a number of initiatives (such as decoy and plainclothes vice operations, and other activities believed to be susceptible to corruption) and limited in the degree to which they could assign personnel to special units. Bratton lifted a number of these restrictions and gave commanding officers unprecedented authority to direct precinct-level operations.

Jack Maple stressed the need to go after guns and gun dealers.⁹ All officers were encouraged to ask everyone they arrested if they knew where guns could be acquired. To add more muscle to the antigun initiative, NYPD leadership nearly doubled the number of officers assigned to the street crime unit (known for its aggressive tactics and its effectiveness) and directed the unit to focus its considerable energies on taking guns off the street.

The NYPD also moved quickly to crack down on the quality-of-life offenses that Giuliani had promised to take on in his mayoral campaign.¹⁰ Police strategy gave precinct commanders new tools to combat “street prostitution, aggressive panhandlers, sales of alcohol to minors, graffiti vandalism, public urination, unlicensed peddlers, reckless bicyclists, ear-splitting noise churned out by ‘boom box’ cars, loud motorcycles, clubs, and spontaneous street parties.” Officers were instructed to treat every arrest as a potential opportunity to make a bigger arrest and take a firearm off the streets.

The new administration also attended to rank-and-file psychology. Bratton requested and received a handgun upgrade for the NYPD, as well as new uniforms and improved bulletproof vests. Additional mobile digital terminals were provided after special operations lieutenants complained of inadequate equipment.

Bratton and Giuliani made it clear that they would not turn their backs on police officers involved in confrontations with the public without clear evidence of police wrongdoing. But Bratton also wanted to send a clear signal that corrupt cops would not be tolerated. When he learned that a dozen officers in the 30th Precinct in Harlem would be arrested for dealing drugs, he arranged to have officers in highly visible NYPD blazers participate in the arrests. The day after the arrests, Bratton appeared at the precinct to address the remaining officers and gave an impassioned speech denouncing corruption and vowing to seek out and prosecute any other corrupt officers standing before him. Bratton then assembled every precinct commander in the NYPD to announce that he was permanently retiring the badge numbers of the indicted officers and to let it be known that in the future he expected every precinct commander to take an active role in preventing corruption.

Over the course of his first year Bratton would replace more than two-thirds of the city’s precinct commanders, bringing in officers who were known for their proactive approaches to crime reduction. These changes and Bratton’s high-level appointments sent a clear signal that promotions would be based on performance rather than longevity and gave hope to dedicated officers among the rank and file. He eliminated the divisional command level and gave precinct commanders unprecedented authority to deploy their officers as they wished.

The “Yalta” of the NYPD: A Leadership Moment

In late March 1994 the NYPD’s senior brass and a select group of outside academics, consultants, and observers went to Wave Hill, a city-owned estate on the edge of the Bronx, to discuss Bratton’s plans for the department. There, for the first time, Bratton publicly announced that the department’s goal for the year was to reduce crime by 10 percent.¹¹ Bratton’s inner circle and City Hall were already familiar with Bratton’s goal (though City Hall discouraged him from publicly articulating it, lest the goal not be met). However, to the assembled group, Bratton’s announcement came like a thunderbolt. “If I could put it in one direct visual, jaws dropped,” said Peter LaPorte, Bratton’s chief of staff. “Literally, mouths opened.”

Bratton, however, believed that articulating such bold goals was an important aspect of motivating the organization to perform.¹² “You needed to set the tone, and you needed to set stretch goals that would inspire people,” he explained. “Ten percent the first year was really based on the idea of doing in our first year more than had been done in the previous four years.” Because of the Safe Streets law, Bratton had several thousand more police officers to work with than his predecessor. With an aggressive new management team and a reenergized force, Bratton felt confident that a 10 percent reduction in crime was a feasible goal.

Institutionalizing Change and Ensuring Accountability: The Birth of Compstat

While employed with the New York City Transit Police, Bratton had gotten a daily report on the crime that occurred in the system. In his first days on the job, Bratton slipped into a similar routine, receiving a morning briefing on the previous twenty-four hours, including reports of major incidents of crime, utility failures, and so on. After several days, Bratton expressed to Maple his astonishment that not very much seemed to be going on. Maple responded, “Are you jerking me or what, commissioner?” There was plenty happening; Bratton was just not being told about it.

Maple went after the numbers, but when he asked the detective bureau for the current crime statistics, he learned that there were no current crime statistics: the NYPD compiled crime statistics only on a quarterly basis.¹³ Maple wanted weekly figures; the detective bureau’s staff responded that they might be able to get him monthly figures. That was unacceptable to Maple. With Bratton’s support, Maple managed to set a requirement for the detective bureau to provide crime figures on a weekly basis.

The first week the crime figures arrived “written in fucking crayon,” according to Maple. Soon thereafter, every precinct was instructed to deliver a computer disk with its crime statistics for the week to borough headquarters. Each borough then sent a disk with all the crime figures for its precincts to headquarters at One Police Plaza. By the end of February, the top command staff was receiving weekly crime reports.

Maple wanted precinct and borough commanders to start looking at the crime figures too. He...