Moving to Baltimore
By 1999, New York City was hailed as the premier example of how to wipe out crime in a metropolis. About 200 miles southwest, however, Baltimore had earned the unwanted reputation as one of the nation’s most crime-ridden cities. In addition, urban decay and a population exodus had transformed the once-vibrant city into a shell of its former self.That same year, a Baltimore councilman named Martin O’Malley ran for mayor. He delivered an anti-crime message reminiscent of Giuliani’s. O’Malley went further, pledging to not only cleanse the city of crime, but also to restore the city’s health and environment. After a landslide victory, O’Malley worked quickly to adopt CompStat for Baltimore. This time, the performance management and mapping technology would not only deter crime, but would improve government service delivery in general.
The program, known as CitiStat, was a sensation. Working under four simple tenets — accurate and timely intelligence shared by all; rapid deployment of resources; effective tactics and strategies; and relentless follow-up and assessment — CitiStat achieved startling results. From repairing potholes to eliminating blight, by 2003 the mayor’s office reported CitiStat had saved the city $100 million, thanks to much improved and more intelligent service delivery. Meanwhile, crime was also declining, though it was still high by national standards.
Now serving as Maryland’s governor, O’Malley has applied the CitiStat philosophy across the state, resulting in a new program called StateStat. O’Malley said his experience in Baltimore compelled him to try CitiStat on a statewide level. And none of it would have been possible, he said, without having been dealt a couple of Jacks.
“I’ve won a lot of hands in governance with two Jacks — [ESRI President] Jack Dangermond and Jack Maple,” O’Malley said. “Jack Dangermond, who advanced, forwarded, fathered modern GIS; and Jack Maple, who [was] really a genius of a guy when it [came] to policing and implementing Commissioner Bratton’s vision for CompStat in New York.
“Jack Maple was our first police consultant when I was elected mayor of Baltimore. In fact, it was a unique and unprecedented thing for us to bring in a consultant for policing. But our city had become the most addicted and violent in America by almost any measure. And we had lost more population than any city in America over a 30-year period as we became more addicted and more violent. As a councilmember, I saw that New York was turning things around in their city by reducing violent crime, and in doing so made their city a more attractive place for businesses to stay, grow and locate.
“So we recruited Jack [Maple] to Baltimore. When Jack was in Baltimore, he had this thought that we should be applying the CompStat approach — the performance measurement, maps and using GIS — to improve every aspect of city government.”
Since being elected governor in 2006, O’Malley has worked on applying the four tenets of CitiStat to an entirely new animal — state government. Now, with StateStat operational, Maryland’s executive leadership and the general public can see where the state is succeeding and where work remains to be done.
O’Malley said StateStat at its core is the rational application of human effort to human knowledge. By using GIS as StateStat’s foundation, O’Malley said Maryland is afforded an unbiased look at the progress being made and how to confront the state’s failings.
“A map doesn’t know if a neighborhood is black or white, blue or green, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican,” he said. “The map knows where the challenges are, where the problems are. It tells us where we need to deploy our limited resources in order to attack those challenges.”
Read Government Technology’s article to learn more about Maryland’s use of StateStat.
