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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."
While it took $45 million to achieve the crime rates Chicago has today, as an open source programmer, I have to think that they wasted about $42 million. For the same level of effectiveness, the cops could have enlisted a bunch of programmers to work on their code using open source, instead of Oracle, and they would gain better security in less money and likely a lot less time. They sprang for 2000 touch screen notebooks? What a waste of money. Sure it makes cops more effective to have fast, lightweight systems, but let's face it... notebooks are very expensive for what you get. Used notebooks or PCs, for example, might be a better use of taxpayers' money.
The way I look at it, they spent $45 mil fighting crime, which is mostly caused by citizens failing to make a decent living, sick of the system and just mad at everything. If they took most of that money and invested it into poverty prevension, you would see likely even better results.
That will make me feel real good when I get "accidentally" shot by the police dept.
Seriously, this whole story is just offensive. The money needs to go to people (or their families) who have been killed or maimed by the cops when they weren't doing anything wrong. The police are just loose cannons and need to be avoided at all costs, especially if you are in the IT industry.
Show me a police database that has not been abused and I'll show you one that does not yet exist.
We should do everything we can to make that job harder and increase the risk.
And I trust 16 year old kids more than I do cops, even if they are more likely to leave gadgets on the bus.
What it comes down to with this is, knowledge == power, an increase in the quality and quantity of information available to the state is an increase in state power & state control. It's not a good thing.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
It took $45 million ... with the help of Oracle
Couldn't they have done it cheaper using MySQL (even if it is not free for commercial use)??
The bottom line is, are they measuring the crime the same as before? If they are, then great, but if not....
Harken to the Bush administration stating that unemployment remains low, but they also changed the way the statistics were gathered and reported - which suits their political agenda rather nicely.
look here and at PBS for an example.
they whine about free speech all day long, and then when a conservative tries to say anything? they censor them of course.