Case and Materials

Tracking Data, Fighting Crime: Multi-Agency, Data-Informed Violence Reduction in Baltimore, MD

Authors Jorrit de Jong, Kimberlyn Leary, Kirsten Lundberg, Gaylen W. Moore

group of city leaders walking through the streets of Baltimore

Last Updated
Jun 30, 2025
Topic
Data and Evidence
Location
North America

Overview

How can city leaders harness data and foster cross-agency collaboration to address persistent violent crime? This case follows the city of Baltimore, Maryland’s innovative and widely-replicated performance management practices—known as CitiStat—against the backdrop of ongoing violence and fraught relationships between police and community. Through the lens of CitiStat’s evolution across multiple mayoral administrations, the case invites city leaders to explore the crucial role of personal leadership in driving performance.

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Introduction

From the late 1990s through the 2010s, when the national spotlight landed on Baltimore, Maryland, it was most often for one of two reasons: the city’s innovative, effective, and widely-replicated performance leadership practices (known as CitiStat)—or its stubbornly high rates of violent crime and murder. This case explores these two issues in parallel, tracing the evolution of CitiStat from 2000 to 2018 against the backdrop of ongoing violence and fraught relationships between police and the community. It zooms in on Mayor Catherine Pugh’s Violence Reduction Initiative (VRI) as one answer to the question of how city hall used its vaunted performance-management practices to address its most glaring problem.

With VRI, Mayor Pugh brought CitiStat-style tools back to their CompStat roots, prioritizing the city’s violent crime problem with intense focus and a collaborative spin. VRI aimed to bring city agencies together on a daily basis to support and refocus a police department that was demoralized, understaffed, and viewed with deep suspicion by citizens. After Pugh’s resignation, it fell to a new mayor, Bernard C. “Jack” Young, to address the city’s cross-cutting challenges.

The case details how successive mayors’ personal commitment and approach to CitiStat either enabled or hobbled their ability to drive performance, revealing leadership’s crucial role in the effort.

Learning Objectives

The overarching learning objective of this case is to help leaders and practitioners examine key features of performance leadership and performance management and what makes these practices effective. More specifically, participants and students will develop skills to help them:

Diagnose and remedy complex and persistent problems, like violent crime and distressed neighborhoods, by adopting a performance-management approach.
Develop an appreciation of the conditions under which data-informed performance management can deliver results.
Reflect on the type of leadership required to introduce, activate, maintain, and evolve a performance-management approach.

The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative is located at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University.