Planning to fail
The ongoing mess with DC agencies' copy/pasted "Performance Plans"
Every fiscal year DC government agencies create “Performance Plans” that the Office of the City Administrator (OCA) frames as the “foundation” of District government operations:
Unfortunately there’s been a longstanding trend for many agencies to simply copy/paste performance targets from year to year and in many cases the “targets” actually call for worse performance as detailed in this post:
Now that agencies have submitted their proposed performance plans for the upcoming 2025 fiscal year we have a chance to see if they have gotten more serious about the “foundation for how we operate and evaluate our government.” In many cases, the answer is no.
The Department of Youth and Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) led by Director Sam Abed has been in the news recently for all of the wrong reasons. NBC4 detailed how a series of fights at the Youth Services Center (the YSC, a juvenile detention facility) led to injuries and arrests. There have also been ongoing issues with drugs and other contraband being smuggled into the facility:
There is also new legislation proposed by DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb that aims to reform processes at DYRS, give courts more ability to intervene and protect independent oversight of DYRS. Given this pressure on the agency it’s deeply concerning that their performance plan has so many flaws:
The targets for FY 2024 call for worse performance with regards to youth-on-staff assaults and injuries to youth at the New Beginnings facility, injuries to youth at the Youth Services Center and worse compliance with training requirements.
The targets also call for much worse performance in terms of youth being re-arrested and a 375% increase in the number of youth on “abscondence” or out of contact and non-compliant while on release in the community.
Independent of the targets, it’s also worth noting the huge increases from FY 2022 to FY 2023 in the youth-on-staff assault rate and the rate of injuries to youth due to assaults at the YSC. Things really have gotten much worse at that facility.
None of the performance measures relate to the “positive youth development programming” that DYRS is supposed to be providing. In addition to keeping juvenile suspects securely detained to protect the community, these facilities are supposed to be rehabilitative. However DYRS’ own data shows that ~3 kids per day are engaged in “positive youth development programming” across both the New Beginnings (NB) and Youth Services Center (YSC) facilities; which is about 2.5% of their average FY 2023 population.
One anonymous DYRS employee described how committed youth can spend significant amounts of time engaged in anything but “positive youth development programming”:
““Juveniles" who are committed are 17-18 with serious crimes have the option to program and go to school. Much of their schedule includes watching YouTube and playing Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. The game is supposed to be a privilege for residents who have displayed improved behavior. Unfortunately, they’re are not programs in place to occupy the residents’ time. Therefore, management will give them these perks to keep them "busy." Residents use the tv’s to utilize Instagram or YouTube, often watching the news, MPD footage, and music promoting violence.”
Moving from juvenile to adult detainees the Department of Corrections (DOC) led by Thomas N. Faust has targets that call for more inmate-on-staff assaults and for fewer of those assaults or contraband seizures to result in requests for criminal prosecution. Common sense and deterrence theory would say that not enforcing the rules within DOC facilities makes the job harder and more dangerous for corrections officers (as well as inmates.)
The DOC’s targets around rehabilitation actually call for worse performance on reducing recidivism among inmates with substance abuse issues and to have fewer inmates being served by the READY Center and the DOC library. Most of these measures are just copy-pasted from the previous year’s performance plan and reflect that for the DOC these “performance plans” are probably just an exercise in paperwork.
The DOC’s performance matters because the vast majority of homicide suspects and shooting suspects spend time cycling through DOC facilities. Every chance to turn someone’s life away from violence, no matter how unlikely, is incredibly valuable and the DOC data shows they are not making the most of those chances.
This lack of interest in meaningful rehabilitation targets carries over to the Mayor’s Office on Returning Citizen Affairs (MORCA), led by Director Lamont Carey. MORCA says their work “ensures that previously incarcerated people are connected to essential programs and services in areas such as employment, health, education, housing assistance, and social services.” However their proposed targets call for a dramatically lower “Percent of returning citizens that successfully obtain employment” and “Percent of returning citizens referred to and completing employment training programs.”
MORCA has also come under fire from Councilmember Robert White who criticized the agency for using “these same copy/paste goals” and whose committee noted that: "This year, our budget season was impacted by a number of complaints about ORCA that we had to report to the Office of the Inspector General and the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability." There’s also at least one obvious data error in their “workload measures.” They report that only 138 returning citizens were employed for at least 60 days but somehow 225 returning citizens were employed for at least 120 days. Since anyone employed for “at least 120 days” would categorically also be counted in the "employed for at least 60 days” category this suggests some very poor data entry and a lack of quality assurance for what is allegedly the “foundation” of local government operations.
The Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG) under Director Jennifer L. Porter has several “worse performance than today” targets in their performance plan. These include fewer eligible patients receiving hospital-based violence intervention services and lower service levels for sexual assault victims:
The Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) led by Interim Director Kwelli Sneed only has 3 targets (out of 18 total measures) and all of them call for worse performance. Their standard for triaging “critical incidents” is “within 3 business days” which is an incredibly low bar for work that ostensibly involves breaking up gang/crew feuds before they erupt into violence. Even worse, ONSE is only achieving that very low bar 76% of the time and their “target” is only 60%.
ONSE’s workload measures also show serious problems:
The Pathways program had fewer people completing the “workforce/life skills component” in FY 2023 despite initially engaging more people than in FY 2022. It’s also surprising that they couldn’t include basic stats like the number of participants or program graduates and instead just listed “New In 2024.”
The “Number of community events and small group activities held by contracted services” fell by 77% in FY 2023. It’s hard to tell from this metric if these events/activities do any good but it raises more questions about what DC is getting for these “contracted services.”
All of the existing targets for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice (DMPSJ) under Deputy Mayor Lindsey Appiah make sense. One area for concern is that there are no performance targets for the Safe Commercial Corridors Program or the Safe Passage Program. The Mayor and Council have poured money into these initiatives but there are no performance targets in this plan to assess their impact. The “workload measures” below mostly reflect report writing and training (which are legitimate) but there’s only one measure (with no target) around visiting Safe Passage locations to hold these programs accountable for results.
Safe Passage is generally regarded as a good idea in theory but has come under fire for a lack of professionalism and results. Here are some student descriptions of the program from a WUSA9 story:
“The Safe Passage does not live up to its name completely because of their lack of effort"
The only aspect of the DMPSJ draft performance plan that appears targeted towards fixing these issues is the “Number of Safe Passage partner locations visited per quarter to monitor operations for program compliance and create Site Visit Reports” workload measure but there’s no historic data or target to inform what is an appropriate umber of visits. This is an incredibly meager level of accountability given that DMPSJ “oversees the day-to-day management of the Safe Passage program focused on ensuring students can get to and from school safely.” Since Safe Passages’ issues have shown the need for more proactive monitoring of “partner locations” it’s concerning that there isn’t a similar workload measure for the Safe Commercial Corridors Program. On paper, getting more trained civilian staff out in the community can improve safety and specifically make things easier for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) by offloading non-core policing duties. But DMPSJ needs to be driving more effective and proactive operations than what is called for in their current performance plan.
MPD’s performance plan also doesn’t have any of the “targets calling for worse performance” that we see in DYRS and DOC but instead is simply missing data and targets for key measures. Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 ended in September 2023 and MPD still (as of the April 3rd, 2024 date of draft performance plan) does not have FY 2023 clearance rate data for most crimes. Clearance rates are incredibly important because they reflect how well police are solving crimes and upholding the certainty of punishment (to deter crime) as well as making cases that can incapacitate offenders from committing more crimes. The fact that there are no clearance rate targets for 5 of 7 listed major offenses is a problem:
However, MPD has released updated clearance rate data for violent crimes that show huge increases from last calendar year.
Thankfully, MPD under Chief Pamela A. Smith is improving clearance rates without official targets in the performance plan; but if performance planning is the “foundation” of government operations there really should be targets. It’s worth noting that MPD’s huge increase in clearance rates has come with fewer officers and under the post-police-reform policies that some critics claimed made effective policing impossible in DC. Improvements in MPD’s operations, increased use of technology and more proactive policing seem to be driving the increase in clearance rates.
The Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) under Interim Director Francisco J. Diaz has mostly sane targets in their performance plan. There are a few measures that seem to be “this should always happen” kind of actions where DFS has given themselves some buffer by dropping the target to 90% but overall this is much less egregious than the targets at DYRS and DOC:
What’s more concerning is the lack of any targets related to working through the backlog of evidence that has piled up since the crime lab lost accreditation in 2021. In testimony to the DC Council DFS touted that they had uploaded “140 cases” in the CODIS (DNA) database “to date in FY 24.” Unfortunately DFS had previously reported a CODIS backlog of over 1,100 cases. We don’t know how long it took DFS to process those 140 cases and the lack of any backlog metrics or target in the performance plan keeps the public in the dark about this critical crime-fighting tool.
The Office of Unified Communications (OUC), led by Director Heather McGaffin, has generally reasonable targets though for some reason they didn’t apply the 90% nationwide standard for “Percent of 911 calls answered within 15 seconds” in FY 2024. The larger concern with OUC of course is that the 911 center is not meeting either national standards or its own internal targets.
There are 76 different agencies, offices etc. that have performance plans so this post won’t attempt to cover them all. This problem of “let’s have worse performance” targets does extend beyond the Public Safety agencies. The Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration (ABCA) has targets for fewer inspections and less enforcement. The Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) has targets for less job creation and fewer new units of affordable housing. There are also some agencies that do a good job of setting realistic targets. Of course setting targets is only one part of performance improvement; agencies then need to actually improve. But the many blatant examples of lazily copy/pasting targets each year are insulting to the public. It suggests that either these agencies aren’t held accountable to performance metrics or the “real” metrics and targets are different from those that are shared with the public in these performance plans. Taking the planning process seriously ought to be the bare minimum for these agencies and the Office of the City Administrator which oversees them.
While DC’s local politicos and media prefer to argue about new legislation and funding levels there is far too little scrutiny of actual government operations. The numbers in these performance plan tables reflect unanswered 911 calls, deadly assaults and missed opportunities to reduce crime. Holding agencies accountable and driving real improvement matters. Ridiculous performance targets are just the highly-visible tip of the iceberg when it comes to the operational problems within DC’s government.
“While DC’s local politicos and media prefer to argue about new legislation and funding levels there is far too little scrutiny of actual government operations.”
Amen. Once again I am grateful that *someone* is doing this important work; I just wish that more of the people who are *supposed to be* doing it were involved. Step it up, DC politicos and media!