ARCHIVES OF THE MAYOR'S WEEKLY COLUMN
Archives of Rudolph W. Giuliani

CapStat Will Increase Accountability and Performance

By Mayor Rudy Giuliani

I recently unveiled the Citywide Accountability Program, known as CapStat. Modeled after the highly successful CompStat program used by the Police Department, it is a data-driven management system aimed at improving both effectiveness and accountability throughout our City agencies. CapStat will require agencies to provide up-to-date information and statistics that will help determine whether current tactics and strategies are working, or whether they should be reassessed to better serve the public. Our goal is to make all City agencies more transparent and more accountable.

It is well known that New York City has enjoyed a historic decline in crime over the past seven-and-a-half years. The key factor that enabled us to take back our streets was the CompStat program, in which crime data is regularly collected from all parts of the City and the results are used to determine how and where we should deploy our police officers. It's a simple principle: Gather accurate data, and use that information to better address the needs of the City. If the statistics show signs of increasing crime in a certain part of town, we are able to address the situation quickly before a crisis develops. It's all about accountability - with so much information being gathered and analyzed on a regular basis, it's hard for police chiefs to ignore problems or evade responsibility for addressing them. We've learned that what gets measured, gets done.

For years people had clung to the myth that our City was simply "ungovernable," but we've shown that a new philosophy of management can transform an entire culture and improve millions of lives. CompStat has led to an unprecedented drop in crime, with overall crime declining by over 57% from 1993 to 2000 and murder declining 65% in that same period. It is a significant measure of its success that CompStat has now been adopted by other police departments around the nation and the world.

CompStat has proven so effective that we've decided to apply the same approach throughout City government. That's why I unveiled CapStat. Just like CompStat, this system will require that agencies provide information needed to determine whether their programs are actually working. The seventeen agencies adopting the CapStat model provide a vast array of services to New Yorkers, ranging from the Parks Department to the Fire Department. In the coming months I expect that nearly every City agency will have implemented a CapStat program.

Perhaps most importantly, CapStat will allow all New Yorkers to have easy access to the same information that the agencies use in assessing their own performance. CapStat data will be posted on the City's website at www.nyc.gov/capstat. As a result, New Yorkers will be able to track such useful information as the crime rates in their neighborhood, the average EMS response times in their area, or the progress of certain roadway resurfacing projects. Making all of this information available to the public will increase accountability, which in turn will lead to even higher levels of performance in the future.

There are some who say that while the CompStat model may work well for a highly regimented agency such as the Police Department, it has no place in other areas of City government. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take children's services: We've successfully enrolled 140,000 children and adults with health care through an initiative known as HealthStat. The Administration for Children's Services has become the model child-welfare agency in the country by carefully measuring the performance of caseworkers and supervisors, and by holding them accountable. As a result, the foster care population has been reduced dramatically, and we have more than doubled our child-support collections, with a record $446.9 million being collected in Fiscal Year 2001.

I've encouraged the Board of Education to adopt its own version of CapStat to improve the management of the school system and to give parents better information about the state of the schools in their neighborhoods. To give students and teachers the best chance to succeed, we need to restore the principle of accountability to the classroom, but to date I am sorry to say that the Board of Education has resisted this effort.

Programs modeled after CompStat have reinvented the way that our City agencies work, and helped to improve the lives of millions of New Yorkers. I am very pleased to see so many of our City agencies adopting this highly successful management style, and I hope that as CapStat continues to yield impressive results, it will permanently change the culture of government by increasing accountability and efficiency.