I was flipping through the channels the other night and came across a televised CitiStat meeting for June 1. A bit of a coincidence since I happened to be looking at the CitiStat website earlier that day. What’s CitiStat, you ask? Well it’s like a spin-off of CompStat, a program in NYC and LA, that makes police officials accountable for their actions by looking at data — number of homicides, where they happened, what’s being done, etc. CitiStat, in Buffalo, is the same thing, but for the Police, Fire Department, and whatever else they can think of, and seemingly not quite as reputable.
Anyways, they were talking to some city official about fire department employees that were IOD, um, that’s injured on duty (but I must’ve heard IOD like a billion times). There was some discrepancy on the definition of IOD. As a result, the data was worthless. The police commissioner spoke as well with his own IOD numbers. After that, there was a lot of arguing and as a result, a meeting was agreed upon. Well, not really. They agreed that they would schedule some meeting, but it’s been a year of “What is an IOD?” Pretty sure that won’t be settled for a while.
They were also able to agree that the number of IODs was somewhere between 50 and 200. Yay.
So despite the fact that the CitiStat program is two years old, there’s still lots to be done. Officials aren’t used to recording and looking at data, and it’s clear, few even had any notion that data could be useful. However, I am glad that they’re making the effort — even if all of the data is stored on a bunch of inconsistent Excel spreadsheets :P.
