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."

Comments

Lower Crime?

[nuclear305]

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?

Re:Lower Crime?

[bman08]

The guys in the precinct are still filing their paperwork with a typewriter and carbon paper! There are tons of ways to use technology to improve the way a PD runs, this seems like something of an uneven distribution of screen realestate.

Big Picture?

[beachplum]

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.

Viewing the Wrong Way

[tintruder]

Perhaps the public would be better served if the screens were placed on the outside of the buildings, looking inward at what is going on in government.

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.

Political showpieces and $$ for supporters

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters

[ratsnapple tea]

Since you seem to be so skeptical about the usefulness of computerized crime tracking technology, I think you might find this article from the Economist an interesting read. I couldn't tell whether it's subscriber-only, so I'll reproduce part of it here:

CRIME maps, which record the locations of incidents in order to help predict where criminals are going to strike next, are used by police throughout the world. But the past is not always a helpful guide to the future, and a team of criminologists from University College, London, led by Kate Bowers, think they can do better. A test of their new model, unveiled in this month's British Journal of Criminology, suggests it is 30% better at predicting crime than traditional methods.

It is a cliché to say that crime spreads like a disease, but previous work by Dr Bowers and her colleagues found that this is exactly how crime does spread. Using statistical techniques developed to study the transmission of infections, they found that burglaries cluster in space and time in predictable ways. For example, properties within 400 metres of a burgled home, particularly those on the same side of the road, are at an increased risk of being broken into for up to two months after the initial incident.

Using these and other findings, the team created algorithms that predict where criminals will strike next, and then used those algorithms to generate "prospective hot-spot maps". These divide an area into 50-metre squares--a level of resolution chosen because 50 metres is a typical line-of-sight for a police officer in an urban area--and give a crime forecast for each square.

In their paper, Dr Bowers and her colleagues reveal the results of a study of burglaries in Merseyside, in northern England. Using historical data, they pitted their predictive modelling method against two traditional crime-mapping systems. They found that their method successfully "hindcasted" 62-80% of burglaries. The traditional techniques, by contrast, hindcasted only 46% of those incidents.

Computerized crime tracking technology like COMPSTAT is already helping to make police departments more efficient, focused and accountable in the real world. No, it won't alert you to a Stop'n'Go shooting spree in the last 3 hours, but it does help you clarify the big picture, about where carjackings are becoming more common, which neighborhoods are becoming more robbery-prone, that sort of thing. And that information can be immensely useful to an overworked precinct with limited resources (overtime, etc.) to do their jobs.

I'm not defending this expensive realtime display covering three walls of a command center, but I don't think the facts justify your skepticism about the use of trend-finding in police work.

Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters

[MeerCat]

Perhaps I was too broad in my original post - it's not the visualization systems per se that are not useful in police work - we used many during my stint with police IT - but the use of large, real-time visualization of ongoing events in centers with hundreds of staff.

I'd agree largely with that - my background was GIS too (census data on chloropleth maps - I wrote Supermap back in the 80's that replaced mainframes with a PC and a CD-ROM drive) and while our law enforcement products will hook in to GIS systems, geographic data is often too complex to let you see true trends (is that a cluster of car thefts in a car park, or is it something to do with the pub down the road, and are those 5 street robberies that appear to be in different locations in fact linked by the fact that they all occur in blind alleys etc.). The Washington room was handy because apparently the mayor loved to ask questions like "well, it would be nice to see the muggings in that area broken down by the day of week and time of day", and whereas they used to have to go off and prepare that for the next week, they can now do it instantly and show the results there and then to an audience of a dozen or so people who can make decisions about what to do now (ie actionable intelligence). And the room in DC was built for maybe 10 or 20 "special incident joint command days" a year, so the police department figured they might as well get some use out of it the other 350 or so days -- they'd say they weren't wasting money but were making use of an idle resource.

To your other points, analysts in Law Enforcement are very different to ordinary officers, and it's true that a lot of their work is analysing events, networks and relationships after an incident, but there is a distinct move towards pro-active analysis too (especially in Homeland Security, COMPSTAT, and a number of UK initiatives).

The main software we sell is link analysis and association and time visualisation tools for analysing commodity flows in fraud, criminal networks etc - very much the analysis after the event and not, as you point out, real-time intervention. It was used for serial killers, the Washington snipers, the LoveBig virus, the Concorde crash, the Soham murders, the Australian BackPackers killer... but to analyse, identify, catch and convict the felons (of course it's very hard to show how you stopped a crime happening, but catching and convicting people earlier is one way).

Oxford Street in London is covered with CCTV and the control room that monitors that can spot pickpockets and the like and radio directly to officers on the street, but I understand that control room is about half a dozen officers and 20 or so normal TV screens.... and of course the big brother aspect of that is making plenty of people nervous already.

But I do take your point (you're very polite for an AC) -- the lure of technology is often hard for police departments to resist, when sometimes simpler, less sexy, pragmatic use of money could render better results but less headlines.

Cheers

Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters

[dasdrewid]

Scenario: I rob two Stop N'Go's on the East side of town. Run in with a shotgun, shoot the guy behind the desk, exact same MO both times. Now, I hear sirens. I jump a train to the West side and hit another Shop N'Go in the same fashion. I live up north, so I start heading that way. I hit another Stop N' Go on the way. 4 identical crimes in 3 different parts of the city.

Purely using your swarm intelligence, how long do you think it would be before someone said "Hey, let's see if someone in another part of the city had a crime just like this?" I'd say quite awhile.

Now, with our "Big Board," as soon as police get on the scene, they send in to central that a Stop N' Go got hit and the clerk got his head blown off by a 12 guage. Now, when four points show up on the map like that, that look exactly the same, one of those guys in the command room is gonna say "DAAAMN!!" and give a call to the units investigating the crimes to tell them to talk to the other units.

Now, instead of 3 units investigating the 4 crimes seperately, we have 1 unit who has access to all the crimes and all the evidence collected at the crimes. That leaves 2 units free to get donu^H^H^H^H investigate other crimes.

You have more experience in this field, so maybe you're right. But from perspective, I see visualization centers like this as a good thing, assuming getting the info for it doesn't put too much a burden on the streetcops.

Ah, that's the thing.

[Eevee]

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?