LOS ANGELES — Just before resigning, a data expert brought in to analyze the Los Angeles Fire Department’s response time reporting called for dramatic changes in the way the department approaches data analysis.
Jeffrey Godown stepped down from his full-time role as interim director of statistical analysis Tuesday, telling the Los Angeles Times that the agency did not give him the resources he needed to do his job during the past two months.
“I would have, quite frankly, liked to have somebody assigned to me in the beginning of April,” Godown told an oversight panel.
Godown, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer who was behind the agency’s statistical crime-tracking system called Compstat, was hired earlier this year after LAFD officials admitted they doctored response times in performance reports.
Godown added that if response times were off by several seconds, he was told “it’s really not that big a deal,” the Times said.
However, Godown also told the Fire Commission before announcing his resignation that flawed data is the primary cause of any apparent delays and department response time may actually be better than it looks, according to CBS Los Angeles.
“During the course of that call they decide to downgrade it, so if a fire truck is supposed to get there within eight minutes, when it’s downgraded, they get there in nine,” he said.
But Godown also said that the agency has not focused enough effort on correcting the problem.
“There has to be a complete overhaul of the mentality of the command staff of why this is in place,” he told the panel. “Being partly right does not work in this business. ... That data is the resource you use to make command decisions to run your department.”
The fire commission voted to create a data analysis system much like Compstat and a panel made up of firefighters, LAPD experts, the Rand Corp and Godown in a consultant role.
“We have the full support and buy-in of the fire chief,” Commissioner Alan Skobin said.