Baltimore's bureaucracy does not generally share the mayor's impatient attitude, and drilling accountability down into the bowels of the organization will be no easy task. Baltimore is the sort of place where work rules have long gone unenforced and the payroll is bloated with the fat of political patronage. If you ask why things are done a certain way, the likely answer is because they've always been done that way. On the sixth floor, at Citistat, all that is beginning to change. As you walk into O'Malley's war room, a large painting hangs on the wall to your left.
Nobody knows who the man is.
But he so clearly reminds O'Malley of a certain friend that he had the portrait taken off the wall of a bar in the Fells Point neighborhood and delivered to City Hall. Perched awkwardly atop the frame is a white name card. The resemblance is to Jack Maple, the famously dapper crime fighter who devised the Compstat system in New York. In the fall of 1999, after O'Malley had won his Democratic mayoral primary, all but securing a win in November, he and Maple went for a drive through some of the roughest parts of East Baltimore. As they drove, they played a game of Spot the Cop.