By Morley Winograd and
Michael D. Hais
Surprisingly, despite
the real challenges Los
Angeles faces today, the
city is out in front of
many of its urban
competitors in
transforming its
capacity to provide a
safe place to raise and
properly educate
children, exactly the
criteria Millennials use
in deciding where to
settle down and start a
family. It is the kind
of challenge that cities
around the country must
meet if they wish to
thrive in the coming
decade.
LA’s biggest win in this
respect derives from the
political courage of
former Mayor James Hahn.
It was Hahn who
appointed Bill Bratton
as police chief, who
then deployed his
COMPSTAT process for
continuously reducing
crime. During his tenure
as the city’s Police
Commissioner under both
Mayor Hahn and his
successor, Antonio
Villaraigosa, Bratton
achieved the same
improvement in LA as he
did previously in New
York,– in a city with
many of the same
societal problems but
about one-fourth the
police resources and a
much larger area to
patrol. Even as
unemployment soared in
2009 during the Great
Recession to 12.3
percent in Los Angeles
County, the city saw a
17 percent drop in
homicides, an
8 percent reduction in
property crime and a 10
percent drop in violent
crime. This is a
first great step in
restoring Los Angeles,
once the destination for
families, back to its
historic promise. Today,
Angelinos feel safer
than they have in
decades.
COMPSTAT is above all a
vehicle for changing
bureaucratic cultures.
In his initial dialogue
with the brass of the
New York Police
Department (NYPD)
Bratton told his
management team that he
planned on holding them
accountable for the
crime reductions he had
promised Mayor Rudy
Giuliani.
Citing the FBI’s
national crime reports,
they responded by
telling Bratton that
since crime “is largely
a societal problem which
is beyond the control of
the police,” it was
completely unfair to
hold them accountable
for reducing it. Since
the police department
was not responsible for
the city’s economic
vitality, its housing
stock, its school
system, and certainly
not its racial and
ethnic tensions, all of
which were the root
causes of crime, the
managers felt it was
unreasonable to expect
them to actually reduce
crime.
When Bratton asked them
what they could be held
accountable for, the
leadership replied that
they were prepared to
accept responsibility
for the “perception of
crime in New York City”
and that their existing
tactics of high profile
drug busts, neighborhood
sweeps, and the like
were effective ways to
manage that perception.
Bratton adamantly
refused to accept this
definition of
accountability from his
team and went about
creating a system that
placed accountability
for crime reduction on
the NYPD’s leadership,
something that also
worked its way down
through the ranks of
every precinct in the
city and into the fabric
of the department’s
culture.
This fully captures the
type of cultural change
that every part of any
city’s bureaucracy must
undergo to become a
Millennial city.
During Mayor Hahn’s
tenure in Los Angeles,
for example, he expanded
the COMPSTAT process to
all departments in order
to hold General Managers
accountable for their
performance under a
program called “CITISTATS.”
Some departments, such
as Street Services,
Sanitation, and Street
Lighting, are still
using the lessons
learned in that
experience to
continuously improve the
cost and quality of
their services.
But Los Angeles’s
recovery has often been
blocked by the City
Council which has proven
reluctant to cede its
traditional right to
intervene in department
operations and to direct
resources to specific
projects or programs in
their Councilmanic
districts regardless of
the overall city’s
needs. When Villaraigosa
ascended to the Mayor’s
office he removed the
potential irritant to
his relationship with
the Council by
disbanding CITISTATS.
That decision has
deprived Los Angeles of
key insights that could
have been used to help
deal with its current
budget challenges.
It also removed one of
the more promising
vehicles for
Neighborhood Councils to
hold city bureaucrats
accountable for the
services they deliver.
The Councils, although
far from perfect, remain
one of the city’s best
hopes for fulfilling
Millennials’ desire for
direct, locally-oriented
involvement.
In contrast, Mayor
Villaraigosa’s
determination to hold
the Los Angeles Unified
School District (LAUSD)
accountable for the
performance of its
students has begun to
pay dividends. Recently
the board voted 6-1 to
adopt a policy mandating
competitive bids
eventually be issued for
the management of all
250 “demonstrably
failing schools” as
defined by federal
education law. The
parent revolution
that spurred this new
approach would not have
been successful without
the support of LAUSD
board members that the
Mayor had helped to
elect.
Including parents armed
with new information on
student performance in
the process of reforming
LAUSD’s schools promises
to produce schools that
deliver superior results
at lower costs and to
create a new,
decentralized,
parent-controlled,
educational
decision-making system
that will be especially
attractive to
Millennials and their
parents.
Now that the Great
Recession has brought
single family housing
back to affordable
levels in many parts of
Los Angeles, the
building blocks of safer
streets and better
schools give the
metropolitan area an
opportunity to establish
an environment that can
attract large numbers of
Millennials just as they
enter young adulthood.
To take advantage of
this opportunity,
however, all members of
the city’s leadership
will need to learn one
more Millennial lesson.
Unlike the Baby Boomers
running the Los Angeles
City Hall today,
Millennials aren’t
interested in
confrontation and
debilitating debates
focused on making sure
one side wins and the
other loses. They want
what business people
term “win-win” solutions
that take into account
everyone’s needs and
produce outcomes that
benefit the group or
community as a whole.
Los Angeles, a city
built on the
expectations of the last
civic GI Generation that
came to LA in the 1940s,
must realign itself to
the tastes of the
emerging next civic
generation, the
Millennials.
Finding such solutions,
given the many
challenges LA faces,
will not be easy. LA
continues to be run by
Boomer politicians, like
those in Congress, who
know how to play up
divisive issues, but
haven’t demonstrated an
ability to get results.
But if today’s leaders
in cities like Los
Angeles aren’t up to the
task, it won’t be long
before a new generation
of leaders who have
grown up believing in
such an approach will
emerge to take their
place. As Ryan Munoz,
a politically active
high school senior put
it, “With all the
technology at our
disposal, our approach
is different. We can be
less partisan, less
confrontational and work
better together.”
Rachel Lester, who at 15
years old just won
election as
the youngest member of
any Los Angeles
Neighborhood Council
by campaigning with her
Facebook friends,
captured the potential
power of the generation.
“When a few teenagers do
something, a lot of
teenagers do something.”
When cities develop
leaders as great as
America’s newest civic
generation, the
Millennials, those
cities will once again
take their rightful
place in the pantheon of
America’s most desired
places to live. Los
Angeles would be an
ideal place to start
that movement.
Morley Winograd
served as a consultant
to Mayor Hahn on the
implementation of the
CITISTAT process.
