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.

How dare they?

[tomstdenis]

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

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

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?

[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.

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

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.