Wednesday, December 9, 2009

City Stat launched

As the latest part of his efforts to radically retool the City's budget into a performance-based process, Mayor Chirs Beutler launched City Stat this week. Modelled after the police department's ACUDAT meetings, and with a nod to Baltimore's CitiStat, Lincoln's version is an effort to monitor the City's progress towards achieving it's budget outcomes. For each of the City's eight goals, a City Stat meeting is planned, where the involved departments present an update on each of the performance indicators.

Not surprisingly, the City's top priority (Safety & Security) was the lead-off meeting, meaning the the police department was in the hot seat. With a series of just a handful of PowerPoint slides, I reported on how we are doing on violent crime, property crime, clearance rate, and injury traffic crashes. I used the same graphs that are posted on our public web site's Dashboard, adding a single sentence to summarize how it's going in the current year, through the end of November. Here's what the review of our performance indicators shows:

Violent Crime: We are well within our goal of no more than 555 offenses per 100,000 population, and the violent crime rate is down 8% again so far this year.

Property Crime: Our bellwether offense, the burglary rate, is up 5% this year. Despite this, large decreases last year mean that we are comfortably under the target maximum of 842 offenses per 100,000 population.

Clearance Rate: Through the end of November, our clearance rate is 30%, well over our goal of maintaining a 24% or better rate. It's the highest clearance rate on record.

Injury Traffic Crashes: Our injury crash rate is well under the cap of 850 per 100,000 and is down an additional 2% so far in 2009.

Next up is priority two: Livable Neighborhoods. The police department has a role in that one, too, so we'll be presenting some more progress data at the next meeting on response times and perceptions of neighborhood safety.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Slow day on the blog.

Anonymous said...

Always include a very prominent caveat against trusting the crime rate numbers for everything but murder, business robbery, and auto theft. I know that's a given for you, but most people out here actually think the actual rates and the reported rates are one and the same.

ARRRRG!!!! said...

I built a snowman.

Anonymous said...

Off topic. A person is blowing snow into the street. No problem. But, they do not pause to let cars by. Now I have a cracked window.
They thought it was funny. I pondered on calling the police.
After some thought I did call. The person using the snow blower did not have any consideration about passing vehicles. In fact they thought it was funny. I avoided a confrontation and drove home.
I have zero dedutable comp so my insurance will cover it. But 18th and Fairfield is not a good street to launch large ice chunks into vehicles.
Also, these people at that location are regular users of police services, domestics and fights and such.

Anonymous said...

Snow happens. Broken window frustrating, could have been worse, sorry...

Ahh had the media not told u to STAY home?
I did not either twice and both times I was stupid almost stuck a few times...

Cute Snowman!

Are we getting a couch patrol?

Anonymous said...

Chief,

Isn't "escort" a more palatable euphemism for "prostitute"? By the way, I noticed that one of these two belles already has a robbery charge pending from earlier this year. The judge probably won't be amused by her latest career move.