Metropolitan Police Department: Hearing on Metropolitan Police Department Spending and Performance Review

In the area of criminal investigations, we are instituting a number of reforms. We have just published a new Standard Operating Procedure for homicide investigations, and we announced a new, more rigorous selection process for investigators and detectives. We are enhancing our investigative training, working with London's New Scotland Yard as a sister agency in this effort. And we are strengthening homicide case management and oversight. For a number of reasons, solving homicides today is more challenging than ever. Still, for the sake of the survivors of homicide, and the confidence of the community in general, we can - and we will - do better when it comes to investigating these and other violent crimes.

In the area of overtime spending, we continue to face enormous pressures - some that we have management control over; others, such as court overtime, that are largely beyond our control. Major events that occurred in FY2000 and FY2001 - including Y2K, the IMF/World Bank meetings, the Million Mom and Million Family marches, and the Presidential Inauguration - generated substantial overtime costs. Our Department appreciates the Congressional support in helping to meet these and other overtime expenditures. As we look to the future, however, I think it is critical that we find ways to ensure that these expenses, which are vital to public safety, are adequately covered.

Our Department is instituting management controls over non-court overtime. In fact, the Department's proposed FY2002 budget includes a $6-million-dollar reduction in total overtime spending. Meeting this budget target will be a challenge for the Department, however, primarily in the area of court overtime. As the Council for Court Excellence recently reported, our officers are spending far too much time in court - sitting around or performing largely clerical tasks for prosecutors. This not only drives up overtime costs; it also reduces officers' availability on the street.

We are making some important progress in this area. On Monday, we kicked off a pilot project with the Office of Corporation Counsel to reform and streamline the papering process in three of our seven districts on a variety of misdemeanor "quality of life" and traffic charges. For example, in certain cases, officers can swear out the charges in their districts, without having to appear before a prosecutor in person. Following the pilot project, we plan to expand this effort District-wide. We are also making progress in reducing officer time spent at traffic adjudication hearings by developing a court calendar where each officer has to appear in traffic court for all of his or her cases only once a month, rather than several days throughout the month.

These reforms will take us only so far, however. By far, the greatest share of court overtime costs continues to come from felony cases prosecuted by the US Attorney's Office in DC Superior Court. This was the primary focus of the Council for Court Excellence study. We continue to meet with the US Attorney's Office and the courts, and to explore possible approaches for remedying the current, untenable situation. It is our hope that the Council for Court Excellence report, combined with our pilot projects involving the Corporation Counsel and BTA, will spark continued dialogue and new action with the US Attorney's Office and the DC Superior Court. I am confident that under the leadership of Chief Judge Rufus King, we will finally achieve additional, concrete reforms.

In the third area, customer satisfaction, we are working to improve our performance on several fronts. One is improving our response to victims and survivors of crime. We just completed a survey of recent crime victims, to measure their level of satisfaction with police service - not likely to be high - and to help identify specific steps we can take for improvement. Our new homicide SOP requires that detectives remain in regular contact with survivors on case status, and we are working with the group, Survivors of Homicide, to enhance officer sensitivity through training. Finally, we are partnering with the courts to make sure that eligible victims and families know about, and take advantage of, the District's Crime Victims Compensation Program. Other customer satisfaction efforts are focusing on training for our call-takers and other personnel who have frequent contact with the community. A large number of our citizen complaints continue to be about rudeness or insensitivity to the public - problems that I am committed to addressing.

The fourth and final challenge I want to touch on this afternoon is perhaps the biggest and most pressing one we face. It involves healing the wounds and restoring the trust that has been breached by the inappropriate and offensive e-mail communications that some of our officers have engaged in.