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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."
yeah, it does imply that things are slipping through the cracks, that's why they are spending money on this, at least that's the obvious reason on the face of this. Imtech appears to have lots of Homeland Security contracts as well as a GSA contract so I think there is probably a bigger story behind all this, but in a nutshell you are correct sir. Incidentally it looks like Imtech is using some pretty nifty DLP displays from Mitsubishi, the DLP part is from TI: DLP.com
Hey, you should go read up on COMPSTAT, the computerized crime-tracking tool the NYPD implemented under Rudy. I'm sure it cost at least a dozen cops' salaries worth of technology, but it was instrumental in driving down the crime rate, and now it's being implemented by many other cities, not just in America, but around the world. In short: yes, making information easy to access and read can be just as effective as hiring cops at reducing crime.
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.
Ironically, they got it from Mitsubishi, who is the Mitsubishi in NEC-Mitsubishi, which do all of Mitsubishi's display products - so most likely they are actually getting this from a NEC division...
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Actually, New York City has one of the lowest crime rates of ANY big city in the USA. See This Link for more info. We do a lot of problems here, but NYPD has reducing crime every single year for over 20 years.
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