Measure What Matters

Reuben Greenberg

Chief of police
Charleston Police Department
Charleston, South Carolina

We are a service organization. Our customers are the citizens of Charleston. In my 17 years as head of this organization, the question that I've always asked myself is, Are citizens happy with the job that we're doing? One metric I use to answer that question is the number of complaints that we receive. Complaints provide a window into your overall performance. When one citizen makes a complaint, four or five others probably feel the same way but either don't take the time to complain or don't think that it would do any good.

I also look at how many compliments we receive. When someone writes to the local newspaper to commend the police, that's important to us. And we pay special attention to tourists. Tourism brings in millions of visitors and millions of dollars to Charleston every year. So, if a tourist gets robbed -- losing, say, $300 -- we compensate that person immediately, by drawing on our investigative fund.

Obviously, the way to minimize complaints and maximize compliments is to do a great job of protecting citizens. To measure how we're doing, we track all kinds of statistics -- from incidents of domestic violence to crimes involving guns. And we use what we learn from those statistics to devise programs to combat specific problems.

Take domestic violence. Very few women in Charleston die as a result of physical abuse -- because we have a program that focuses on public arrests. The first time a man commits an act of physical abuse, we respond aggressively. Instead of arresting him at home, we arrest him in public -- even at his workplace. We had a doctor here who had beaten his wife. So we went into his waiting room and, with all his patients watching, told him that he was under arrest for wife beating.

Gun Stoppers is another program that has been successful. Do you know how many guns were found in Charleston city schools last year? None -- because we've taken the prestige out of having a gun. Kids bring guns to school to show off. We burst that bubble. We give $100 the same day to the person who tells us that someone has a gun in a book bag, in a locker room, in a gym, on a playground -- even if it's just a toy gun. As a result, few kids want to show off their guns at school anymore.

Ultimately, we don't just want to fight crime -- we want to make life better for people. So all of our officers can make on-the-spot decisions to help citizens. Say it's raining, and an officer drives by and sees a woman and two kids huddled under an umbrella, waiting for a bus. If that officer doesn't have a call, he'll put those people in his car and take them where they are going. After all, people like these are the ones who pay our salaries -- and who pay for the car that the officer is driving.

Reuben Greenberg became chief of police in Charleston in 1982. He is a graduate of the FBI Academy, And he has taught sociology at California State University and political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Val Ackerman

President
Women's National Basketball Association
New York, New York

We're a young organization, and, like any young organization, we are eager to attract customers. So attendance at our games is the metric that helps me gauge the health of our business. Obviously, attendance generates revenue, but it also generates team morale and sales momentum. Success breeds success. When people realize how much others enjoy coming to games, they're more likely to come to games themselves. So I closely track the number of tickets sold, including season tickets.

We now have two seasons under our belt. In our first season, we had 8 teams, and we projected that we'd sell a leaguewide average of 4,000 to 5,000 tickets per game. We ended up averaging nearly 9,700 tickets per game. In our second year, with 10 teams, average attendance jumped 12% -- to almost 10,900 per game. The NBA didn't average 10,000 fans leaguewide until its 29th season.

But the real game for the WNBA isn't about selling tickets; it's about exposing a whole new audience to basketball. The fans at WNBA games are different from those who attend NBA games. They're younger, and more of them are women. Like the NBA, though, we get plenty of high-profile people in the stands. Last year, the opening game for our new Washington, DC team -- the Mystics -- attracted some very powerful women from political circles, including Tipper Gore and Sandra Day O'Connor. (The Mystics actually led the league in attendance, averaging nearly 16,000 fans per game.) Game attendance -- the number of tickets distributed -- is not the only measure that we look at, of course. But it's relevant, it's quantifiable, and it lets us evaluate how we're doing from year to year.

Val Ackerman helped to create the 1995-1996 U.S. Women's basketball team, which won a gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics. At the University of Virginia, she was a four-year starter, and she played one season of pro ball in France. The WNBA, owned by the NBA, has 12 teams nationwide and will air games this summer on NBC, ESPN, and Lifetime.