Slashdot Mirror
Big Screen for NYPD
Roland Piquepaille writes "With millions of emergency calls every year, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) decided to invest in a new command and visualization center in order to keep up with the ocean of data it has to deal with. According to this article from BusinessWeek Online, the display system consists of hundreds of Mitsubishi digital light-processing (DLP) monitors covering three walls. The NYPD thinks it will help it to also manage the hundreds of thousands of annual arrest records and to further reduce crime in the city. You'll find more details and references in this overview, which includes impressive pictures of former visualization centers built by Imtech, which will integrate the NYPD one."
And they got all this from NEC for only $567 billion.
Spend money to improve public services!?!?! The animals!!
;-)
This is why democracy doesn't work...
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
NORAD eat your heart out...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
..it doesn't run Windows... else they might see..
... ok ready to groan on a Sunday morning? ...
... I almost can't type it ...
... Get ready for a +5, Bad Pun...
... NYPD Blue Screen.
FLR
Yes! Now I can hack into the police station and have the screens all say "Napster" or "Nurv is evil" just like in the movies. All I need is the video of Gates using and praising KDE running on Linux 2.6.7-rc2 while his henchmen rough up Linus. Best part is, I can do it through telnet. God hacking is so easy and gui based!
What exactly is the advantage over having, say, four or so monitors on a desk? Since the people are sitting pretty far away from the wall display, wouldn't you be only getting an effective resolution about a tenth (or less, depending on distance) of what you'd have from being right in front of the display?
What happens when they suddenly get a few minutes free, because with all this new efficiency, they caught all the criminals? Big screen pornography?
How exactly does a new wall of monitors lower crime?
Are these monitors secured to the wall in some new way to prevent theft?
All joking aside, how does this lower crime? If a Bigger, Better display helps lower crime, doesn't that imply that they are currently allowing things to slip through the cracks because they can't manage their data?
The only thing left for them to do is beef up security around the WOPR.
Anyone remember that show? Some guy took over as the chief of the Washington DC Capital district and enacted major changes. The police department used a huge real time statistics tracking system and displayed it on a huge display. I think the idea was kind of revolutionary to the average joe like me; but I don't know if police were using a system like that before then.
:D
I wouldn't mind seeing systems like this implimentated in say, elected public offices to keep track of opinion areas, ethnic densities, crime rates, poll results, average pay. etc. To help them keep better tabs on what they need to improve and how to vote on what bill.
Oh, did I mention I plan on making a run or two for public office?
Except when the entire staff uses it at once, to monitor for problems on the field of play of major sporting events.
What, exactly, was the point of that, sir?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Heres's the direct link to the BusinessWeek story
It means that everyone is reading from the same page - yes, everyone does still have their own monitor, but no matter what task each individual is performing, the main overview is displayed on the wall.
Besides, it looks good.
liqbase
... kind of reminds me of SimCity, where you can pull up a graph of the city and work out where crime "hotspots" are.
...all they need is some fancy animated GUI that does searches by scrolling down lists on screen or visually matches faces to a photo on screen and they're set.
They both have specialty packing funny meat between two buns.
I wonder which wall will be assigned to display "Bloomberg".
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I thought that these huge rooms with huge video screens were just in movies, but one time as part of my job I went to visit a mobile telephone network operator, and I was surprised to see that their NOC was exactly like that. Our guide said that the big screens are, in practice, mostly used to show DVDs during the night shift.
When will they introduce a sensor embedded glove for use with manipulating data on these screens? Data of, say, videos of murders happening in the near future?
This is just my extrapolation, but maybe there is a productivity and teamwork benefit to having a lot of people looking together at one thing, like the use of a projector in a meeting room, rather than the individuals all having access to the same information by themselves. Might be a mental thing rather than a resolution thing.
"I... I don't know exactly how to put this, sir, but are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean, he'll see everything, he'll... he'll see the Big Board!"
--- Ban humanity.
+1 Funny
"This is a UNIX system ... I know this!"
The magnitude of the fraud, waste and abuse so rampant throughout government pursuing boondoggles like this is endless, and the excuse is always some "Sound Bite Focused" explanation that "It's for the Children", "It's for the fight against terrorism", or some other thinly veiled B.S. intended to take ever more tax money from citizens and waste it on needless government programs.
A smaller example of this was in Portland, OR where the police needed an extra quarter million dollars in order to be able to track "Racial Profiling" in traffic stops. Seems that none of the cops were able to record the vital statistics of who they stopped unless they were given Palm Pilots (and all sorts of other alleged I.T. expenses to support them).
Seems nobody even considered those little paper notebooks and a few boxes of pencils.
Amazing how the public seems entirely ignorant of the paramilitarization of the police and the resulting "Us against Them" rift that continues to widen.
The best thing that can be done in the U.S. (Short of Jeffersonian suggestions of periodic revolutions to toss out abusive and tyrannical politicians) would be to cut all government spending and staffing by 25% immediately, and 50% within 5 years.
Just imagine being able to say "Main screen turn on." in THAT place!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I think that this is just an overrated excuse just for them to have a big screen to watch rerunds of cops on... o_O
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Doesn't this remind you of the police station in that movie? Next we'll have tickets automatically being printed out of our parking meters.
I worked years for the IT division of a major city's police department and I can assure you that nothing is a bigger waste of money than such things as visualization systems, etc. These are, as in most politics, a way to pass huge amounts of money to political supporters and friends.
Any "trends" in criminal activity are located far faster by the cops on the beat than by a computerized system. These guys know their beat like the back of their hand: details that would never be stored in a computer are at their fingertips. They are _extremely_ observant. By the time any "visualization center" knows it has a problem the cops have been on it for hours at least. This is a form of "swarm intelligence": independent agents (police officers) cooperating, exchanging information and coordinating activity. If you impose a hierarchical command structure, the flow of information can be imparied.
As for "trends": what are you looking for? A 5% increase in convenience store robberies? Day to day police work deals not with statistics but with individual incidents. "Trends" are important, but mostly to politicians and bureaucrats who must fund police work long-term. The police are concerned that someone robbed two Stop N'Go's in the west borough in the last 3 hours, killing 3 people. That's not trend analysis, that's a f'ing problem to be solved quickly.
There are good uses for statistics and trend analysis in police work, but they don't require a huge realtime display of information - they require only a CRT that can produce a graph or a map and some quiet time for the captains to think about how they will allocate their beat's manpower next month or how they can justify a request for additional manpower for a particular precinct where crime levels are rising year-to-year. This is traditional spreadsheet and database work.
In this case, I wouldn't be complaining about having to squint at a quarter of the screen.
-- n
Jokes are supposed to be funny.
Here's an example, with a similar picture - 60-feet wall of monitors:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2070312.stm
We're now living in a Big Brother world, aren't we? Of course, if it helps catching criminals, then so be it.
The only way to activate it is by saying "Main Screen Turn On".
You can blame the poll.
In the images shown in the links, and from the limited experience I've seen of them in person, they aren't looking at the same thing. There's five or six different things being displayed (and a monitor showing CNN because the boss thinks it's neat) that have nothing to do with each other. If the people only use a small portion of what's being displayed (or don't really use it at all), it's a pretty expensive toy.
Now if the display was one 'thing'--for example, a wide area network status with some of the monitors devoted to a map showing the links, while others showed statistics--then I see the value. And I'm sure there are places using them in just this way; is it just that people showing off the multi-monitor displays feel a need to be flashy with ten different things being displayed, then go back to a boring yet practical application?
he's simply using /. as an advertisment tool for his blog-come-technology site
AYBABTU on the brain.. but with that big screen how can you pass up saying:
Main screen turn on!
I am just trying to reconfigure the web proxy I am using since NTL have let the default one be abused. Go here for alternative proxys and details how to change to a different one.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Roland Piquepaille as a whole seems redundant.
Check out his blog to see STORIES ALREADY POSTED ON SLASHDOT.
You can do the same with a couple of PC projectors.
I set up a network management center this way with scotty. Course it goes through loads of lamps.
Deleted
If they did that where I live, they could get by with a 5 inch diagonal screen mounted on a wall.
Of course, that's not going to happen. We don't have much in the way of crime -- our biggest problem is usually someone failing to stop at a stop sign.
The sheriff's department usually only comes out for funerals. One time, rather than drive out to check something out, they saved the trip out by asking me if I could look into it and let them know if there was anything they needed to worry about.
That's so lame. Far better would be an old time virus like Roaches or maybe have Godzilla attack the city.
Another noble step toward stepping up New York Precrime Division (NYPD) of the future. It's a pity we don't have any precogs. But wait, "Dubya" can be a precog. He foresaw WMD's in Iraq ... not! :)) We call him "Agatha" or "Angus." :))
I really think this could come in usefull to help corelate seperate calls faster, especially since many operators may be handling calls in the same area and not even know it. One quick look at the screen and you can see a series of disturbance calls moving in a line, or a growing cicrle.
paul reinheimer
Or at least intelligible.
The only way to reduce crime is by educational, economic, and cultural means, not by taking police state measures.
Look at Japan.
Watch a Burger King workaurant get robbed, and you'll see how insightful beefing up the security around the Whopper can be.
Oh dear lord. I wanna break in and play the world's sweetest game of CounterStrike. Screw AimBots, I really *will* be able to see people on the other side of the map.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
This would kick ass for SimCity except they are playing with a real city. Perhaps if they practiced with Sim first...
While it might be true to say that "Crime Doesn't Pay", it certainly "Justifies Bigger Budgets."
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Why don't the White House, CIA, FBI, NSA, OHS and the rest of the Sesame Street gang create a centralized inter-agency data-exchange center with a screen like this 3 times the size of a friggin' IMAX theater so they can begin to effectively improve their state of being on the "same damn page"? Hey, if bigger is better, like Starsky said, "Do It. DO it."
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I wonder if Bill Lumberg will be working on this project? That would be terrific.
The subject says it all...
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
...The new transparent monitor and petabyte storage facilities will require operators using special gestures to retrieve and review suspect information. In addition, the facilities will house four expiremental clairvoyants who have the ability to visualize murders before they occur. Potential murderers will be tried under New York's new precrime laws.
Is a terrible thing to behold.
So they spent a shitload of money on a better display than you have at work / home. Deal with it.
I'm not a local, but all the evidence seems to point towards them doing a damn good job overall, so I say let them get on with it.
Here in Houston, Texas the multi million dollar system crashes frequently.
Didn't that burn down?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If you run a large data center, and shit hits the fan, CNN could quite possibly be your first notification of the issue. Being aware of service-affecting events gives you an opportuinty to take proactive/corrective action, and mitigate downtime.
A place I worked actually had a meeting about this when we designed our data center.
And yes, it does also look cool.
Now, if we could only staff this war room with a bunch of good looking out-of-work actors and a couple of embedded journalists, then we would be all set and New York would be ready for just about anything.