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

Supplier?

[Anonymous Coward]

And they got all this from NEC for only $567 billion.

Re:Supplier?

[aldoman]

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...

How dare they?

[tomstdenis]

Spend money to improve public services!?!?! The animals!!

This is why democracy doesn't work... ;-)

Re:How dare they?

[cosmo7]

New York isn't crime-ridden. In terms of offenses the city comes 23rd in the largest 25 cities in the US.

Which is probably why New York's finest are usually busy issuing tickets to pregnant women for sitting down, bar owners for allowing dancing, seniors in the park feeding pigeons, or for that most heinous of crimes, sitting on milk crates.

NYRAD?

[ErnstKompressor]

NORAD eat your heart out...

I hope...

[Cytlid]

..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.

OT - its a joke, giggle

[Stevyn]

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!

Something I've always wonders about these displays

[Eevee]

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?

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think they have trouble managing their data?

The statute of limitations for rape is 5 goddamn years in part because of all the data that needs to be retained. Many different precints have files on different rapists that years later are proven to be the same perp.

Re:Lower Crime?

[sjalex]

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

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.

Re:Lower Crime?

[Xoro]

In the 1990s, the NYPD developed an intensely data-driven style of policing centered around a program called CompStat, which basically tracks crimes and their locations, times, etc. This allows the police to see where things are heating up and deploy more and better-targeted resources to the area. It's been extremely effective, and crime has dropped about 60-70%.

Obviously, visualization tools mix well with this kind of system, but why a big board? One possible answer is that there is a whole culture of public accountability that goes along with CompStat -- local commanders are called in to group meetings and are expected to know the figures for their area and discuss plans for dealing with them. When you get a group talking about the same visual data, a shared image is really helpful. Since the idea seems to mesh well with the culture, and the culture has been successful, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Re:Lower Crime?

[ratsnapple tea]

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.

Looks like

[Dachannien]

The only thing left for them to do is beef up security around the WOPR.

The District?

[Hiigara]

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.

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? :D

Think Ahead

[SEWilco]

And with its many uses, the first use of this single room will be to untangle the scheduling needs of all the staff who need to use the room, one person at a time.

Except when the entire staff uses it at once, to monitor for problems on the field of play of major sporting events.

Re:Something I've always wonders about these displ

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

The big rooms actually exist

[h_jurvanen]

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.

Re:Hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

kind of reminds me of SimCity, where you can pull up a graph of the city and work out where crime "hotspots" are.

The solution for these "hotspots" in SimCity is to destroy them and build nice parks instead. Harlem is still standing, so I can safely say that nobody in charge of NYC plays SimCity, unfortunately.

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.

Kubrick flashback!

[HarveyBirdman]

"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!"

Most commonly heard quote on system launch day

[telstar]

"This is a UNIX system ... I know this!"

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.

Demolition Man

[Quill345]

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.

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.

Something similar in U.K.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

Where I live

[eric76]

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.

Usefull

[PktLoss]

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.

Re:Slacktime

[Nurseman]

In crime infested New York, police plays GTA while on duty!

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.

Crime will find a way

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to reduce crime is by educational, economic, and cultural means, not by taking police state measures.

Look at Japan.

SimCity? :)

[kyoorius]

This would kick ass for SimCity except they are playing with a real city. Perhaps if they practiced with Sim first...