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Chicago Police Force Wins CIO Magazine Award
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is the sole winner of the 2004 Grand CIO Enterprise Value Award for its data warehouse and application suite. In Taking IT to the Street, the magazine writes that Chicago police officers have an immediate access to more than to 200 GB of data and nearly 8.5 million records of arrests and other incidents. It took $45 million and 3 years to the CPD to build this database with the help of Oracle, but the return on investment is huge, with labor savings of $88 million from 2001 through 2003. And while the national crime rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years. So all this information can and does prevent crime and save lives, but in Police Power Coming Up Behind You, the author reports he is somewhat worried that all these tools could fall into wrong hands. This overview contains selected excerpts and comments about this long article."
It'd be a little awkward to throw a desktop in a police cruiser. Generally they mount the laptops in the center of the dash similar to a cell phone.
I just spent the past two years working on a project to link together Security Departments across the world, sharing information about criminals, victims, vehicles, etc. Basically, it would all the security departments to tap into a huge database, and retrieve information about Incident Compliant Reports (better known as ICRs).
Initially, we were an open source project. Naturally, we were swatted down by the Navy Marine Corp Intratnet (NMCI), because they wanted Microsoft-Only solutions (but they allowed us to choose from SQL Server and Oracle for our databases). Strike one up for the beaurocrats. Anyway, my point is this, it is not always possible to go with an open source solution due to political reasons (as opposed to technical). I will say, however, that Oracle is probably the right tool for the job, when comparing with other open source solutions (read Postgres and particularily MySQL).
Another thing....when working on this project, the people I worked with during the design phase had absolutely no concept of security (as in information security) or Need-to-Know basis. They thought that every person who used the system should be able to lookup anybody's information. Let me clarify, not only would military cops be using this system, but also the people who worked the Pass & ID offices (these are the people you have to go to get a pass to come onto the base). In other words, this would be like allowing the people at the DMV to view your police reports, (ie you were a suspect in a particular crime, but never charged). I proposed allowing the 'DMV' people to see that you weren't allowed to get a driver's license or base pass if you had been convicted of DWI/DUI (based on the DOD standards), but not be able to read the police reports. It's all a matter of Need-to-Know. They strongly disagreed.
To sum up, these types of systems will more than likely be used in ways they shouldn't. Not necessarily nefarious uses, but still violating one's privacy. This is a necessary tool, I think, but most likely not implemented properly (privacy-wise, in IMHO). The police need info fast, and privacy needs to be taken into account. It is a delicate balance to find.
The Chicago Citizen ICAM allows us to see crimes (as REPORTED - without any verification as to the actual occurance of a crime) in our own neighborhoods. It's a very nice little tool, and I hope it can survive a good slashdotting.
And you really can't blame the police when a violent criminal creates a hostage situation and gets shot as a result of efforts to try to end it. Or when someone flees police and runs into someone else.
Christmas eve 2002 in Uniontown PA (about an hour drive from Pittsburgh) a 12 year old boy was shot by police after crashing a stolen vehicle and attempting to run away. There is much more to the story, but I'm not going to get into it here.
People were up in arms about the shooting, but if that little bastard hadn't been out committing a felony, he'd probably still be alive today.
I think that police brutality should be punished severely, but I don't blame the cops when they are in the right.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Oracle don't just make a Database, they consult and design...
It took 10 months to design the data model....
Not the sort of thing you do in 20 minutes with SQL CREATE statements!
I live in Chicago, and wanted to respond to several comments I've seen in this discussion and to the article. I also live in one "ghetto" and work in another, which are famous hotspots for police activity.
First, their IT infrastructure claims to make policing more effective. As several have pointed out, correlation is not causation. As a further addendum to that, several other forces are at play which could be responsible for the drop in crime: gentrification, relocation of public housing residents (many of whom are going to the suburbs and beyond), and what seems to be a few more jobs at the low-wage end of the spectrum. Basically, you'd have to try to control for a) new, affluent residents of "crime-ridden" neighborhoods making more calls, b) how relocation of public housing residents (many of whom are involved in criminal activity that ranges from peddling to drug dealing and gangbanging) is tranforming crime (I'd guess, but I don't know, that drug arrests and such are down, because murders and rapes are most definitely going strong in Chicago), and how job creation for poor folks is also reducing some of the crime.
Secondly, lots of people have immediately argued that this IT infrastructure is a good thing and that Slashdot police-bashing is a Bad Thing.
In Chicago, police corruption and brutality is systematic at the highest levels, pervasive, and shocking.
Further, a good IT infrastructure cannot mitigate the effect of the completely shitty policies that keep good police from being effective in certain situations. Many of my friends on the police force lament the way that resources are deployed and policy works in handling drug-related crime, because the police necessarily tip their hand in busts, allowing the worst criminals to get away and leaving a couple of poor drug-addicted saps (not exactly the folks who marshall significant resources to get heroin and crack into the city and into the neighborhoods) for the police to nab.
Finally, and this is absolutely significant to this award, the Chicago police have often argued that their job is NOT crime deterrance or prevention, but crime reponse. Therefore, in several cases of police brutality and misconduct, the police claimed that they knew that crime was likely to occur in the places they raided or severely beat (killed in one instance, raped in another) innocent people, but that they couldn't just show up in order to deter the crime, because then the crime wouldn't happen. If the police are serious about deterring crime in Chicago, then the CLEAR system needs to be used in conjunction with pre-emptive prevention policies. These are things like simply stationing officers in cars in places they know (probably know even better with this new system, though it doesn't take a genius) lots of drug dealing happens, a stunningly effective and rarely used technique compared to the-chase-folks-around-yelling-"nigger"-and-then beating-them-up-without-an-arrest-but-pocketing-th eir-cash technique.
I'm not trolling. I believe in strong, effective policing. But that's so far from what I see in Chicago that congratulating them for an IT infrastructure that reduces costs and makes the police more "effective" is laughable compared to their abhorable behavior on a daily basis.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
"Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years" - absolute rubbish. Seems more to me like a guy trying desperately to spice up his article.
Do you have a citation for this? Granted, my math shows only a 13.5% decline from 2000 to 2003, based on the City of Chicago's own reported statistics. But that doesn't really make it "rubbish." To me, it says that we're using different numbers, so I wish I knew what numbers they're using (I went by total Index crime reports, and as I said, from 2000 to 2003).
What is your take on the crime rate in Chicago? And where is your data from?
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Some coverage: Chicago Police case, Google News on the recent Iowa/Drake U thing
Although I could be wrong. Does anyone have any more detailed knowledge of this? A quick Google search was inconclusive.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Here in BC we used to have photo radar vans. That program was recently disbanded for various reasons, including operating costs.
One of the cost overruns was in that in the plan, OCR was intended to read the license plates from the photos of speeding cars. It never worked, and eventually it was replaced (or perhaps supervised) by a human operator. IIRC, the whole OCR fiasco cost millions in tax money to "develop" the software which just couldn't handle the task with enough accuracy to be completely trusted.
Granted, this was several years ago... software and hardware are probably better now. Plus for what you suggest, 100% accuracy isn't required.
> I'm pretty sure he's on the record as a
> supporter of Pol Pot in Cambodia, too.
yeah right. christ guys, back up your opinions with *citations*. As an example, here's one from chomsky himeslf, from "Genocide; the United States and Pol Pot"
Pol Pot was obviously a major mass murderer, but it's not clear that Pol Pot killed very many more people -- or even more people -- than the United States killed in Cambodia in the first half of the 1970s. We only talk about "genocide" when other people do the killing. [The U.S. bombed and invaded Cambodia beginning in 1969, and supported anti-Parliamentary right-wing forces in a civil war there which lasted until 1975; Pol Pot ruled the country between 1975 and '78.]
So unless you think that chomsky is praising pol pot for being a mass murderer, I'd take your head out of your ass if I was you.
Oracle doesn't charge you per record stored in database, or number of queries. You'll be paying Oracle per databse CPU, or a site licence.
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