Some argue it can be traced
back to how departments evaluate their officers.
BY KATHERINE BARRETT &
RICHARD GREENE |
You’ve doubtless heard the
maxim “what gets measured, gets managed.” Sometimes it’s attributed to
management guru Peter Drucker, though others also get credit for it. But
whoever actually coined the phrase, we remember the first time we became aware
of it, about a quarter of a century ago.
It seemed like a purely
positive sentiment to us back in the days when we naively believed that
performance measurement could cure most governmental ills. If gathering data
about inputs, outputs and outcomes could solve all management problems, then
cities and states had access to a golden key to a more effective and efficient
future. Then reality intervened and we recognized that even good measurements
don’t necessarily result in the right policy or practice changes.
But, somewhat more ominously,
we’ve become aware of a troubling question that lurks in the field of
performance measurement: What happens if we’re not measuring the right things
in the first place? If Drucker -- or whoever -- was right, doesn’t that mean
that we may manage government programs in a way that leads to more problems?
Sometimes, for example, states and localities focus their measurements on the
speed with which a service is delivered. Faster always seems better. But often
delivering a service quickly means doing so less effectively.
For fire departments, response
times are a commonly used measure of service quality. But "the requirement for low response
times may incentivize firefighters to drive fast," said Amy Donahue,
professor and vice-provost for academic operations at the University of
Connecticut. "And it has been shown that while speeding saves very little
in terms of total driving time, it is much more dangerous -- both to those in
the emergency vehicle and other innocents who might get in their way. The
potential for accidents is high, and when they happen, the consequences can be
very tragic."
As the field has become aware
of these dangers, many agencies are trying to mitigate them by improving
education, prohibiting responders from exceeding speed limits, and requiring
responders to participate in emergency vehicle operators programs.
Examples like this one are
everywhere. But we just came across something in the March 2015 edition of New
Perspectives in Policing that had never occurred to us before and that seems to
be widely ignored by public safety organizations around the country. It was
written by Malcolm K. Sparrow, professor of practice of public management at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
As violent incidents in several
of America’s cities show the underlying tensions between police and the public
they serve, Sparrow argues that some of this dissonance has actually been
encouraged by the fact that most police departments are pushed to measure crime
clearance and enforcement. These are important factors, but they have little to
do with community satisfaction. Meanwhile, he points out that “a few
departments now use citizen satisfaction surveys on a regular basis, but most
do not.”
The measures currently used do
little to demonstrate the success of police departments in detecting problems
at an early stage and preventing them from becoming harmful to a community’s
well-being. As he writes, success at these critical goals “would not produce
substantial year-to-year reductions in crime figures because genuine and
substantial reductions are available only when crime problems have first grown
out of control.”
Sparrow points out that the two
most commonly used measures of police work -- crime reduction and enforcement
productivity “fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control.”
Clearly superior performance in
crime control results from the citizens’ sense that the police are on their
side and use force in a fair and effective way. But the commonly used measures
don’t get to any of these things. As a result, according to a comment from the
commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force in Australia, quoted by
Sparrow: Sticking to the usual measures is unhealthy if it “causes police on
the streets to set aside sound judgment and the public good in the pursuit of
arrest quotas, lest they attract management criticism or compromise their
chances of promotion.”
Katherine Barrett & Richard
Greene
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