Chief Calls New Target for Solving Cases Realistic
By David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post
In 2000 and 2001, D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey set a goal: Police would solve enough homicides to achieve a 65 percent clearance rate. But they missed this target twice, achieving a 57 percent clearance rate in 2000 and falling even further short last year, with a clearance rate of 48.5 percent.
So when the homicide-solving goal was set for 2002, Ramsey made a change. The target clearance rate this year -- recorded in a scorecard used by Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) to measure performance and dole out Ramsey’s bonuses -- is 50.9 percent.
The new clearance rate goal is below the national average and below what D.C. police were achieving a few years ago. The figure is also below the average clearance rates of cities with similarly high numbers of homicides.
“I know that would raise a lot of eyebrows in my neighborhoods,” said D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), who said he was unaware that police had lowered the bar for their own performance. “People would be quite flabbergasted.”
Ramsey said yesterday that his department lowered its homicide-solving target this year because he wanted to set a more realistic goal for detectives.
“It’s more encouraging,” Ramsey said. “You get these stretch goals, and [when] you don’t even come near it, you get hammered for it.”
A clearance rate is determined by taking the number of homicide cases closed in a particular year and dividing that figure by the number of homicides that occur in that year. Police deem a case closed if someone is arrested and charged, or if police decide that the crime was committed by someone who is dead, being prosecuted elsewhere or otherwise unavailable for arrest.
The city’s homicide clearance rate has dropped sharply since Ramsey became chief, even though the number of homicides has also declined. In 1997, the year before Ramsey came to the District, there were 301 homicides and a clearance rate of about 70 percent. Last year, there were 233 homicides and a 48.5 percent clearance rate.
According to FBI data from 2000, the average homicide clearance rate among cities with populations between 500,000 and 1 million was 56.6 percent.
Ramsey has reshuffled the department’s homicide unit twice to try to improve performance, first assigning detectives to the city’s seven police districts and then recentralizing them this year in the Violent Crimes Branch.
The clearance rate so far this year is about 50 percent, police officials said yesterday. Homicides total 105, up about 24 percent over last year.
Neither Ramsey nor Sampson Annan, the department’s director of research and resource development, could say yesterday why the department initially set 65 percent as a goal for clearing homicides. Ramsey said he thought the figure was meant to be slightly higher than the average for other big cities.
Last fall, Annan’s office averaged the 2000 clearance rates for the District and 13 other cities with a high number of homicides. Some -- like Baltimore, with 78 percent, or New York, with 77.9 percent -- were much higher than the District, according to Annan. Some, like San Antonio at 43.9 percent, were lower.
The average worked out to about 60 percent. But that goal was not adopted for the mayor’s scorecard, Annan said, because it was too ambitious given the department’s 2001 performance.
“Jumping from 40-something to 60 percent would not be very realistic,” Annan said.
Instead, he said, police took 105 percent of last year’s clearance rate and came up with a target of 50.9 percent. In 2003, the target will be 105 percent of this year’s clearance rate.
“The whole [idea] of performance goals is to use the goal-setting to improve performance, not to make yourself look better,” said D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who chairs the judiciary committee.
Ramsey, who hopes the department will far exceed its target for this year, said criticism of a target clearance rate is inevitable. “Somebody’s going to be there to say either, ‘You didn’t do it,’ ” Ramsey said, “or, ‘You did do it, but it was too easy.’ ”