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By Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
 I hear something very familiar when I travel the country. No matter where I go, Americans are asking, "What's wrong with Washington?" They're frustrated that the government doesn't solve problems. There's no accountability for actually making things better. From immigration and tax reform, to education and protecting Americans at home and abroad, I keep hearing people say their government just isn't working. And the reason this sounds familiar is that when I ran for Mayor, New Yorkers had just about given up on their city. They believed the city's best days were behind them. Citizens in New York came to think that city government was broken beyond repair and there was little reason to hope for a better future.
Things are different now. In fact, for millions of New Yorkers, it can be hard to remember the New York City of the late-1980s, but certain images persist: filthy streets, random violence, and graffiti-covered subways made many people believe the Big Apple was rotting. Books were written that declared the city "unmanageable." For citizens, the worst symptom of all was crime and, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "defining deviancy down." In 1993, there were 1,946 murders a year and more than 11,000 major crimes per week. More than one million people were on the city's welfare rolls, which was one-in-seven New Yorkers. The city's private sector had lost more than 320,000 jobs. And according to a Time/CNN poll, 59% of all New Yorkers would have left the city if they could have.
These conditions explain why many people thought the city was unmanageable. But I ran for mayor because I believed otherwise. I believed that when people said the city could not be managed, it was an excuse used to absolve politicians of their responsibility to make things better. And that's what political leaders are supposed to do: solve problems. Although I knew the city wouldn't be easy to manage, I was confident that with clear priorities and relentless accountability the government could serve the people again.
Enter CompStat
As Associate Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, one of my responsibilities was to analyze and disseminate national crime statistics. So when I became Mayor, I used that experience to reprioritize and change the way the city measured crime. Before I took office, a police officer's success was judged by the number of arrests he made. If a police officer made more arrests than the previous year, the department believed he was doing a better job—regardless of whether or not more crime was taking place over the same period of time. And that was the problem with that analysis: the number of arrests doesn't necessarily relate to how safe the public is. And a safer city is what New Yorkers deserve.
To ensure the New York Police Department—and each of the precinct commanders who run the city's 77 precincts—could more effectively focus on crime reduction, the NYPD began recording the numbers of crimes that were happening in their precincts every day. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and we wanted to manage the NYPD and reduce crime, so we began measuring crime every single day.
Collecting real-time data was the first step to making the city safer and the beginning of a computer-driven program called CompStat, which allowed the NYPD to compare crime statistics—day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year—while also figuring out exactly where crime was taking place. The computer program tracked and mapped crimes, right down to the street corners. Using CompStat, for instance, we could see very quickly if there was an increase in burglaries in a specific neighborhood. Then we could compare the crimes and determine patterns, so when police officers and detectives were in the neighborhood, they'd be armed with better intelligence.
The key to this crime-fighting strategy—which kept it from being a theoretical exercise and made it so effective—was the accountability of the CompStat meeting. Twice a week, half a dozen precinct commanders from around the city would come to police headquarters to meet with the Police Commissioner and NYPD leadership. The precinct commanders would stand at a podium in the front of the room with maps of their own precincts and the crime statistics projected above them. The job of the precinct commanders at these meetings was to explain what they were specifically doing to attack the crime problem in their area. The job of the NYPD leadership in the room was to make sure the strategies being used were getting results—and the precinct commanders were getting all the resources they needed to reduce crime. If a precinct commander was having a problem ending a wave of vehicle thefts, the leaders in the room had the power to quickly deploy a unit to that area specializing in auto theft busts.
CompStat didn't just give precinct commanders in the field the responsibility of lowering crime, it gave them the resources to get the job done as well as direct access to the insight and direction of NYPD leadership. CompStat gave the NYPD a well-defined and focused system of accountability. The NYPD gave New Yorkers a much safer city. By the time I left office, murders were down 66%, from 1,946 in 1993 to 649 in 2001. Vehicle theft was down 73%. Shootings were down 70%. Burglary was down 68%. Robbery was down 67%. Overall crime throughout New York City plummeted 56% and the city that was once considered the crime capital of the nation became the safest large city in the United States according to FBI statistics.
"I'm Responsible"
I've kept a sign on my desk ever since I became Mayor with two words on it: I'm Responsible. The CompStat program forced every precinct commander in New York City to take personal responsibility for reducing crime. But many other problems were hurting the City, and when I was elected, I also faced the challenge of turning around an enormous economy and eliminating a $2.3 billion deficit.
Businesses and jobs were disappearing from the city. Nearly every industry as being hurt by high taxes. The city's Hotel Occupancy Tax was the highest in the nation.[1] It was so high that the Professional Convention Management Association urged its 35,000 meeting planner and association members to boycott New York.
When I proposed my first tax cut, it was a controversial idea. That's because in a city ruled by liberal Democrats, tax cuts were never thought of as a way to solve the city's fiscal problems. When I took office, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 5 to 1 throughout the city, and in the City Council, Republicans were outnumbered 44 to 7.[2] Previous administrations thought the only way to turn the city's economy around was through higher taxes and increased spending. I knew those were bad policy that undercut personal initiative and entrepreneurship.
The Hotel Occupancy Tax was the first tax we cut. We cut it 29% and saved guests $161 million between 1995 and 2002. Trade groups also stopped their call for a boycott and over the course of my administration, tourism surged from 26 million visitors a year in 1993 to more than 37 million visitors in 2000. The tax cut also had the supply-side effect of increasing revenues for the city by almost 90%. So the lower tax brought in much more revenue than the higher tax, a principle still rejected by one side of the political spectrum.
During my eight years as Mayor, my administration cut or eliminated 23 different taxes—ranging from personal income tax to the sales tax on clothing purchases to taxes on commercial rents. These cuts saved taxpayers and businesses more than $9 billion. By the time I left, New Yorkers enjoyed their lowest tax burden in decades. The economy expanded, creating more than 430,000 new private-sector jobs; personal income increased 50%; and the $2.3 billion budget deficit I inherited when I came into office became a $2.9 billion surplus.
The key to limited government and fiscal conservatism isn't just cutting taxes. To energize an economy, government also has to control spending. That's why I required all department and agency heads to present 5 to 10% cuts in their budgets every year. When an agency wanted money for a new project or program, I told them if they could find half the money by trimming their own budget or making the agency more efficient, then I would work with them to provide the other half of their request.
We also looked for government-owned properties that the private sector could better manage. You might be shocked to find out that when I became mayor, the city owned a radio station, a television station, parking lots and a number of other endeavors that weren't within the sphere of the government's proper role. So I did what any good capitalist would do: I sold them off. This privatization effort included:
- Selling WNYC radio for $20 million;
- Selling WNYC-TV for $207 million;
- Selling the 54th Street Municipal Garage for $14 million;
- Divesting the United Nations Plaza hotel for $85 million;
- Selling the New York Coliseum to private developers for $345 million, creating the Time-Warner Center and spurring the revitalization of Columbus Circle;
- Overseeing a 70% drop in the number of housing units managed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development; and
- Contracting out city services from building inspections to bail processing to save taxpayers money and create more private-sector jobs.
The New York Renaissance
New York's turnaround did not go unnoticed. More people visited and more businesses created more jobs in New York. CompStat was awarded the 1996 Innovations in American Government Award from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the Ford Foundation. And George Kelling and William Sousa of the Manhattan Institute called it, "The single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the 20th century."[3]
New York City's Department of Correction was quick to create its own program based on the principles of CompStat. The initiative, called "TEAMS," the Total Efficiency Accountability Management System, helped reduce violence among prisoners by 95 percent and was nominated as a finalist for the Innovation in Government Award in 2001.
CompStat became the foundation for innovation and accountability in just about every aspect of city government, as agencies adopted similar systems of internal analysis to ensure good government. One of the greatest success stories came from how CompStat transformed welfare. Before my dministration, welfare offices and case workers of the city's Human Resources administration were judged by the number of people they had on welfare: the more, the better. So it was no surprise that one in seven New Yorkers was on welfare. The office had every incentive to get as many people on welfare as possible. But I believe good government should provide a safety net, not a hammock. Instead of putting generations of people onto welfare, which the system had been doing, government should do everything it can to help people find jobs and become productive, taxpaying members of society.
We changed the mission of the case workers: It was now their job to find jobs for people on welfare. And by the end of my administration, we removed 640,000 people from the city's welfare rolls—making it the lowest level since 1966. In 2001 alone, our Job Centers placed more than 151,000 people into jobs. Our first step was to change the name of our welfare office to "Job Centers." There were actually lawsuits against the city that tried to stop us from changing the name, but in the end, we won, and all of the City's welfare offices are now "Job Centers."
Washington's Culture of Spending
My former Director of the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget (O.M.B.), lived by the motto of putting the "M" in "O.M.B." We need the same kind of thinking to change the culture of spending in Washington. CompStat was the key to transforming New York and it could offer profound lessons in management for every part of the Federal Government.
For instance, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 42% of the Federal workforce will reach the age of retirement over the next 10 years. This provides a tremendous opportunity to cut the number of civilian employees. If we only replace half of them, we can reduce the number of full-time federal employees by 300,000. This might seem like a daunting task, but in New York City we cut the number of full-time city jobs by nearly 20%—excluding cops on the street and teachers in the classroom. Applying CompStat principles of accountability would help the government find ineffective programs and target them for elimination. Elsewhere, technology can be used to replace retiring workers and save taxpayers considerable money. Using the 2005 average compensation of $70,000 for the federal workforce, a 20% reduction would save taxpayers over $21 billion per year beginning in 2017—and this does not include the costs saved in healthcare and other benefits.
I understand the frustration I hear from Americans. I know what it's like to be faced with a government that most people do not think is competent. But I believe America's brightest days are ahead. Our Federal government, though difficult to manage, can be managed—efficiently, effectively, and with accountability. We know what works, now we need strong leadership that can achieve results. And I believe we can make Washington work again.
Rudolph W. Giuliani was the 107th Mayor of New York.
Endnotes
[1] Kirk Johnson, "What Saved The Hotels? Not Just Tax Cuts," New York Times, July 30, 1997.
[2] Steven Lee Meyers, "Dog and Elephant Days: Giuliani Woos G.O.P.," The New York Times, August 4, 1994.
[3] Manhattan Institute Civic Report, "Do Police Matter? An Analysis of the Impact of New York City's Police Reforms," December 2001.
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