Metropolitan Police Department: Oversight Hearing on FY2000 and FY2001 Performance

Improving our criminal investigations and increasing our homicide clearance rate will require a number of reforms, which I outlined for the Committee in January, at your roundtable hearing. I am very pleased that the Committee's follow-up report endorsed the changes I have proposed in such crucial areas as the selection and retention of detectives, standard operating procedures, technology, training and performance management. We have already begun designing and implementing a number of these reforms, and I look forward to working with the Committee in the coming months as you carry out your critical oversight function around these changes.

Enhancing customer satisfaction is, in many ways, tied to improving our criminal investigations. Madame Chair, as you and others heard during the Committee's public roundtable and the WOL Radio town hall meetings, one of the biggest complaints by the survivors of homicide and other victims is the lack of consistent and compassionate follow-up on the part of the police. That is why we are working to establish a family liaison function specifically dedicated to the task of victim and survivor outreach and assistance. We are also analyzing the results of our just-completed victim survey to see what additional policies and procedures may be needed to improve our response to all victims of crime. We have already developed new ways to inform victims and their families of the District's Crime Victims Compensation Program. But we can - and we must - do a lot more to help victims cope with the aftermath of crime and get the services they need.

Finally, technology innovation will continue to be a top priority. As the Committee pointed out in its recent homicide report, crime mapping is an important tool not just for detectives investigating crimes after the fact, but also for PSA officers and officials who are working to identify patterns and prevent crime before it spins out of control. Installing our Information Retrieval for Mapping and Analysis - or IRMA - system is at the top of our technology agenda. And we plan to make this system available not only to our own members, but also to the public, via a special version of IRMA on our Web site. This will allow our partners in the community to map and analyze crime as well.

Continued development of our WACIIS system, our MDC backbone, and other critical systems will remain a priority. During this quarter, for example, we plan to issue the RFP for our new and comprehensive records management system, called PRIDE. This system will be an essential component of our overall technology strategy, bringing together in one place information from a variety of disparate systems.

Finally, during the first week of June, we plan to unveil the new Joint Police-Fire-EMS 9-1-1 Communications Center on McMillan Drive, Northwest. This center will, for the first time, co-locate all public safety call-takers and dispatchers under one roof. The new center will include state-of-the-art telephone, radio and computer-aided dispatch systems. In particular, a new Automated Call Distributor will be installed in the center, replacing the current ACD at 300 Indiana Avenue that has been discontinued by the manufacturer. I would invite any members of the Committee who are interested in touring the new Joint Communications Center to please contact my office.

These three priorities - improving our criminal investigations, enhancing customer satisfaction, and implementing new technology - are critical if we are to continue to reduce crime and advance community policing in the District of Columbia. Our biggest challenge in achieving these priorities remains the pressures in our personal services budget.

As I noted earlier, our sworn headcount has dropped by nearly 100 officers since the beginning of this fiscal year. And with passage of the "longevity bill" by Congress, our attrition rate is likely to increase in the coming months. Our inability to hire new officers has not only put pressure on our PSA staffing levels. It has also precluded us from promoting members to detective and supervisory ranks, because we could not fill the slots that would be created. At the same time, the freeze in hiring civilian employees has all but halted our civilianization efforts. I simply cannot justify moving a sworn police officer to an operational position if I cannot hire a qualified civilian to take his or her place.

The hiring situation has put additional pressures on how we deploy personnel and use overtime. Overtime spending is something our Department continues to monitor. Earlier this week, I asked the District's Chief Financial Officer to assign auditors to examine payroll records for Department members who were in the top 10 percent of overtime earners - both court and non-court overtime - during 2000. This request came after we began examining overtime records in response to a request from the Chair in preparation for this hearing. That examination revealed that some of our officers earned two or more times their base salary in overtime payments last year, including one officer who made more than $200,000.

My request for this audit does not mean that I believe any officers have abused the system. We had several major events last year that required extensive overtime, as well as continued operation of Mobile Force and other overtime projects. However, I do feel it is important that our overtime expenditures undergo a thorough and independent audit from time to time, and now is a good time to conduct such an examination.

The bottom line is that the Department will have a difficult time meeting our new priorities and maintaining our recent gains if pressures on our personal services budget continue. I will continue to do whatever I must do to put more officers on the street, to adequately train and equip them, to advance community policing, to improve our criminal investigations, to enhance our services to victims, and to implement new technology.

Meeting these priorities would be much easier, however, if our sworn headcount were fully and consistently funded. Allowing our sworn strength to fluctuate throughout the year, as it has over the past 18 months, creates tremendous pressures on existing programs and represents lost opportunities as we attempt to move forward.

I look forward to working with this Committee, the full Council, the Mayor and the CFO's office as we develop a plan of action that continues to make the District of Columbia a safer city by continuing to make the MPDC a stronger, more professional organization.