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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."
"The wrong hands" already have these tools. There are bad cops in every force. You'd like to think they aren't out there, but they are. Fortunately, the good ones far outnumber them, but you still have to hope luck's on your side anytime you encounter an officer.
At least we (suposadly) report all of our crime. Unlike other cities.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
I hope they implement some sort of GIS/mapping solution (no not google image search) to make all that data more useful/presentable.
That's one thing that NYC did right in lowering their crime rate/"cleaning up the streets". They'd did very simple mappings of WHERE and WHEN crimes would occur (turns out there was a pattern... they'd show up to one complex every night just after dark with all sorts of calls)... and increase patrols in those areas during those times. Thereby using their available forces more efficiently by using the data they already had more effectively.
*shrug* It's not just about instant access to relevant information for the officers, it's what they do with it... (for good or bad) =)
E.
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If the biggest tactics change was implementation of this system, then it is also the most probable reason for the drop in crime. Considering the size of that drop (16% is not small) it is a safe assumption that a large amount of thaty drop is in fact due to the implementation of this new system. Outreach programs didn't change much, the methods of answering a call (beyond the assistance of the computer) didn't change much, what does that leave? Did 16% of the population move to another city so that the crime rate percantage would stay the same while the numbers would seemingly drop?
The article itself states things like the amount of time saved booking people, paperwork, etc. So we could also look at the extra time the officers can now spend on the street as a direct result of this system.
Even if the system itself isn't providing the extra information necessary to arrest individuals that may have later added to the number of murders, it is still giving officers more time to go out and answer calls, etc.
And there were direct correlations drawn between the system and other violent crimes, which lead me to believe that the same tactics that are being used against other violent crimes (with the use of this new system) are probably being used to get murderers and near-future murderers off the street. I doubt they have decided to only use the system in solving only one type of situation but not use it in a higher fatality one.
Now I'm sure someone will pick apart my words and argue things like "near-future" murderers and try to say things like I am promoting a police state, but that is just their own ignorance. By near-future murderers I mean people that are arrested for another crime with no clue that they would have murdered someone a week from now. So a gang member gets arrested a week before he would have had a violent confrontation with a rival gang member, or shot someone as he was attempting to steal a car. If people who are breaking the law get arrested faster, or are found faster and arrested, then things like this will happen.
The numbers are there, and while anyone can come up with statistics to say anything, this isn't an MS report to show better TCO, this is percentages based on raw numbers, ie, number of murders in a year.
And while I like the idea of outreach programs and such, (from the article) saying that all of the money should have gone to the families of the deceased is just ignorant. I think outreach and police together are the solution, outreach is a slower solution and had it been implemented much earlier perhaps it could have kept the numbers down to the number that was achieved last year. And the system has basically paid for itself in labor cost savings and such, while giving away the money would have had only two affects; 1) made people feel a little better (unless they noticed the price the city placed on their family members life) and 2) made a politician look good.
The system has paid for itself, and even if all it did was help with labor costs, it is worth it because it will keep cops on the street more, cutting down on time filling out paperwork. And those time savings are hard fact as well.
Whee signature.
You my friend are getting carried away in your quest for "open-source everywhere".
...
It's imperative you realise that more often than not (actually practically always) open-source has come to be for a particular solution as an option only after a proprietory solution for the same niche has already been in the offing for a while. Sometimes in function, sometimes in form.
Just some examples:
1. Unix begets Linux
2. MS_Office begets OpenOffice
3. Windows* begets multiple ergonomically inclinded GUIs based on X
4. Oracle DBs beget MySQL
5. Winamp begets XMMS
These are just instances that came to my mind (and probably the most obvious too). There may be examples to the contrary, but to the best of my knowledge there are no "large-scale" solutions that I know of which have "first" been implemented as open-source and then aped (or not) in some proprietory form.
I might ofcourse be wrong, but I would imagine (and more importantly in the context) that it would be very hard (impossible?) for a mission-critical solution such as that of a police force to be put into use w/o some form of:
1. Quality guarantee: which suits are "brandishers" of and which "a few guys hacking away" would find tough to "certify".
2. Support to fall-back on: ditto argument.
It is however entirely possible that now, once this one solution is on the ground and ticking, we might soon see some state department make an open-source implementation of the same.
Clearly, corporate money today has the financial muscle over open-source to market/sell solutions in new avenues. Nothing wrong with that, especially if those new avenues are then paved with more open solutions.
It i svery simple. It means that there is always some third couse that allows you to connect any two events. It is called lurking variable.You have to do you research in such way that you eliminate it, otherwise you proved nothing. Example: The number of ice cream sales and the number of drawns are highly correlated. But you cannot conclude that increase in ice cream sales leads to more drowns.
Exactly. Having had some professional experience with systems like the NCIC, I can say that there are all kinds of information in these "criminal" databases on people that have never been convicted of a single misdemeanor. These people have commited no crime yet they are in the databases, sometimes with very prejudicial "half-truths" (e.g. records showing they were arrested for murder, but not showing they released the same day and never prosecuted because the real killer was caught).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
However, credit when credit is due. In Germany, we are used of reading stories about multi-million government projects which, in the end, do not work. Several examples are police projects. This sickens me because we tax payers are ripped off and because good police officers waste their time and cannot protect us. So, again: congratulations to the Chicago police.
Without a LOT of serious work, you CANNOT draw the conclusion that this new system was the ONLY changed variable. The real world is messy. There are dozens of factors that might influence the crime statistics, some of them related to reality and some of them related to the politics of the statistics.
As a newspaper reporter and later editor, I saw public officials spin such figures all the time. If ANY statistic showed something positive, it was THEIR actions which caused it. If a statistic showed something bad, it was their evil opponents who always were the fault. As a political consultant over the last 12 years or so, I've been a part of the same spin. Politicians will sit in meetings and acknowledge that they have no idea what causes most things (either for good or bad), but they are willing to take credit or assign blame in whatever way is good for them.
I have no opinion about whether this system is a good thing or not in its present form. I don't even have any opinion about whether the money could have been better spent elsewhere. The only thing I'm pointing out is that there is no honest, hard evidence that this thing possibly could have reduced crime by 16 percent -- unless this system gives police the power to predict who's going to commit crimes and arrest them ahead of time.
I worked in IT for criminal justice a few years back. We ran a system that intigrated data from various agencies to provide this type of data to officers on the street, lawyers, etc. It was not what it appeared to be. Result sets often were very different depending on when you ran them, as various legacy systems would time out, etc. To be short, it would most often provide incomplete data. And we had a major DB vendor (not Oracle or MS, but MAJOR) taking credit for our awesome system.
The simple fact is that criminal justice IT is not up to date AT ALL becuase you have so many different agencies running REALLY OLD technology, and none of them really want to work together. Who funds the project when you are not only working with various agencies, but different branches of government?!
I don't buy the propoganda.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
George Bush spent his entire business career working closely with Saudis and losing their money by the billions. He'll never take a hard line with them. They're an Islamic based monarchy with extensive ties to terrorism, but they play ball, and that's what counts in Bush's world (which bears little resemblance to the real world). Pakistan was providing real WMD to "Axis of Evil" countries while we were hunting imaginary WMDs in Iraq. Again, they won't be touched because they play ball.
Until we start focusing on actual terrorism issues and not politically convenient smoke and mirrors, we'll never make any progress against terrorism.
-B
For the most part I agree with what you are saying, but I feel the need to respond to one portion of your comment. I should also preface this by saying that I also live in Chicago and live in very close proximity to a housing project that is being 'redistributed'.
I disagree when you say that placing police in cars in problematic areas works. I live on a street where police come regularly. They sit in their cars, sometimes two or three at a time for several hours on end. It's a one way, off-the-main-drag sort of street and my personal opinion is that they come here to hide. Anyway, despite the fact that the police are present and in number almost nightly 100 feet from the front door of my apartment, the following has happened within the past 18 MONTHS:
(1) My girlfriends car was broken into. They punched a hole through her door with a screwdriver and cleaned out her vehicle.
(2) My vehicle has been broken into twice. Both times they smashed out the window and took everything inside.
(3) Both basement apartments in my building have been broken into and robbed.
(4) A girl in my building was attacked by someone hiding in the laundry room.
And these are just the stories from my building. A coworker of mine lives a block away, and about 2:00am one weekend, he hears a crunching noise. Looking out the front window, he sees someone driving over his motorcycle while trying to park their car. he calls the police and runs outside. it turns out that the driver is an unlicensed, uninsured underage drunk teenager who has no id. the cop shows up, and he and the girl start talking to each other in spanish; refusing to speak english for my friend. he asks repeatedly what is going on and is told to shut up by the cop. The cop turns around eventually and starts asking my friend for his drivers license, insurance, title and registration. when my friend asks about the girls id, the cop yells at him and threatens to arrest him. then tells him to shut up again. By the time it's over, my friend has given the cop every piece of ID he has and the cop has warned him not to 'push it'. the girl got off without even getting a ticket.
So, I agree with you when you say that police claim their job isn't crime prevention. I will go one further, though, and say that police (in chicago) seem to think that their job is revenue generation.
I was surprised when i first moved into this building to find that i was starting to get parking tickets on a regular basis- with a grand total of 7 by the time i resolved the problem. It turns out that I was getting parking tickets because i drove a pickup truck, and, in the city of chicago, it is illegal in most residential areas to park a pickup truck on the street overnight (Some wards have special permits you can use that will allow you to park, but mine doesnt). The insanity of that law is another discussion- especially when you take into account the fact that i drive a compact pickup and the guy up the block drives a cadillac escalade and has no problems.
This problem cost me over $500 to resolve; and I'm still bitter about it. If anyone is interested or having the same problem, the solution is to get non B-Truck license plates. I chose environmental plates, but if the back of your truck is covered, you can also get RV plates. anyway, i'm drifting off-topic.
I can't even begin to tell you how angry this stuff has made me. The chicago police system is wrong in every sense of the word and the best database in the world is not going to make up for that fact.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
According to this document, there were a grand total of 237,706 crimes in Chicago in 2002.
Of those, 172,812 (~73%) were 'non indexed' crimes. Of that total, nearly 60,000 (nearly 35%) were either narcotics violations, or prostitution.
Want to reduce non indexed crime by 35%? Make drugs and hooking legal.
Want to reduce overall crime by over 25%? Make drugs and hooking legal.
This doesn't even take into account the intangible reductions in "drug-related" crimes (i.e. gang bang murders over sales territories, deals gone bad, etc). Not only that, but it doesn't require a $45 million database, or three years to build. Just take two laws off the books. (yes, I know about all the attendant time and effort required to do such a thing...and I am blatantly ignoring it)
Just an alternate viewpoint. Flame away.
Folks, if you want to worry about police abuse, these databases [the Chicago and NYC ones here] aren't the ones to worry about. They are used to enforce accountability on chiefs who spent all their time staying out of trouble by doing absolutely nothing but the bare minimum police work. Applying accountability and using these stats to test out new policing methods makes a huge difference in crime, like 10-20% annual drops sustained over several years in the New York and Chicago examples. These numbers cannot be explained by gentrification or nationwide crime drops.
If you want to raise alarms, look to the Patriot Act and its variants, but not these efforts.
Rick Pastore is spreading FUD. He has no evidence that the police know where cars are purchased in the database info, and frankly the usefulness in Comstat clone database systems has nothing to do with keeping that kind of personal information! The usefulness comes from being able to check for outstanding warrants and for mapping areas with lots of crime, not from features allowing on the fly police browsing of your credit history, which they can't do anyway!!
As someone who likes psychology and knows it pretty well, I can tell you what is wrong with Chomsky and his ilk.
It is called GUILT.
As one psychotherapist put it, "Guilt is a form of delusions de grandeur. It states 'Everything is happening because of me'. This is the line a child assumes when something goes wrong in his surroundings - like, for example, when parents are fighting all the time et al".
When one has guilt, he starts projecting it towards anything that can be equated to him like his country et al. From outside it looks like a highly moral person judging imperfections of the world, but inside it is a little boy whose subconscious patterns want him to be "bad" while he wants to prove that he is not bad.
This thing is one of the two biggest foundation of leftists' state of psyche. Hence constant bashing of the US and Israel or claiming that the Western world is supposed to "share its wealth". Hence all of the attempts to inflict this guilt on the rich for them being rich.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
(I'm very aware of the potential for abuse in these systems if a cop wants to make your life hell; for a start, all data coming in and all queries need a full audit trail available to ombudsmen, police oversight boards, and defense lawyers.)
=S
I can't think of any possible "good" associated with the "bad" of firearms.
I can...it's called "hunting." As I think back, I think back to the settlers of the 1800s who, as they made their way west, needed firearms to hunt bear, deer, etc. as sources of food to make it through the winter. They also used them to protect their milk cows from predators such as wolves.
Do you think a man could club a bear to death? Bears are big; I bet it takes a heckuva bow and arrow combination to bring one down (disclaimer: I am not a hunter.)
OK, man's earliest ancestors didn't have firearms, and they hunted down big game. They also hunted in packs of 10-20 and lived in tribes, lucky to live past 30. The settlers were typically single families homesteading, with the nearest neighbor or town miles away.
Man with club + bear = well-fed bear.
I look at the reverse from your statement; the good of firearms is the ability to hunt for food and protect oneself from one's predators. The associated "bad" is that if the predator is another human, then the predator can and generally will use the firearm as well.
My point was that any good idea can and will have bad applications "in the wrong hands." The "in the wrong hands" phrase is stating the obvious in an attempt to diminish the worthiness of something while wasting space on a page and the reader's time.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
That's nice for cops to have--but every citizen should have online access to that information--it's all public record, after all. Why shouldn't I be able to check out the houses in the neighborhood I'm considering buying in for crime statistics? Or to check my prospective babysitter for priors (again, convictions are a matter of public record).
Paranoia is zero? Then pray tell, why did the US government round up nearly 2000 Muslims after 9/11? Why were hundreds detained for over a month, without charges? Why are some still there even today? (and why did the NY Times and Washington Post stop reporting on it? Did they give up on anyone caring?) How come detainees report being beaten by guards because they looked Muslim?
Why is the deportation rate for all illegal immigrants down by 25% and the deportation rate of Arabs and Muslims is UP by 75%? Why is it that Muslim citizens in the US are fleeing to Canada in fear? How come "little Pakistan" in Brooklyn, formerly home to over 500,000 is half empty?
Why is the government using the Patriot act to spy on Arab and Muslim Americans, but not using it to go after anyone else, like drug dealers? Why did Dr. Goldstein of Florida get a lesser charge for plotting to blow up mosques and islamic schools in Florida, instead of the new Terrorism statute? Why is it that the thousands of hate crimes against Muslims since 9/11 don't get harsher sentences?
How come John Ashcroft is forcing people to plea bargain by threatening them with "enemy combatant" status? How come the FBI is given orders to count specifically mosques in every area? Why is it that Muslims who wrote editorials condemning terrorism in all forms, including by other Muslims, got a visit from the FBI?
How come all these new anti-terrorism laws don't curb the drug flow into this country? How come all the mafia members aren't caught yet, what with all these new snooping laws?
Don't straw man the argument, I'm not going to toss in Fox News, or the "Jewish owned media" as you put it. I think that the US has sharply overreacted in this case and panicked the Muslim population in this country. The one group who we are counting on to tell the rest of the world that we mean well (they're Americans too! They have debated on our side in the past! They helped us in Iraq both times.) and we are treating them poorly. Why do you think the mosques burning down here in the US post-9/11 got headline coverage in the Middle East? Or when Jerry Falwell called Islam's prophet Muhammad (pbuh) a terrorist? Do you think that actions like these have no consequences?
The US needs to realize that it can act too aggressive sometimes. Things like this have ruined the US's reputation abroad, and the war was obviously a bad move in international relations. Heavy-handed stuff like this generates even more hatred and more terrorism.