Criminal Offense -- Technology aids NYPD's crime-fighting efforts
April 5, 2004 11:11am
Information Week
Long before Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Police Department had begun the task of reshaping itself, with technology playing a major role. Now, having been thrust into the front line in the war against terrorism, the NYPD is focusing again on technology.
It's using technology to solve and prevent crimes. Police officers can call up digital mug shots online to be shown to victims-the high-tech equivalent of the police lineup. Another system, called LiveScan, enables fingerprints to be transmitted online to federal law-enforcement authorities.
Although New York City has seen crime rates plummet in the last decade, law-enforcement officials need all the help they can get in tackling cases-the city boasts some of the underworld's most creative talents. "If you underestimate the ingenuity of the criminal mind, you're in trouble," says recently retired assistant chief John Gilmartin, commanding officer of the NYPD's office of technology and systems development.
The NYPD is taking no chances. It's designing a militarylike command center filled with state-of-the-art gadgetry such as liquid-plasma displays that will let operators view trouble spots around the city's five boroughs in real time; a data warehouse that will connect the department's intelligence, operations, and anti-terrorism units to one another and to outside organizations; a wide area network to accommodate high-bandwidth images and voice files; laptops for cops; and a computer-aided dispatch system that will be linked to the 911 emergency and 311 government information systems.
The NYPD is "at the cutting edge in its use of technology," says William McDonald, chair of the criminal justice program at Monroe College. Although the technology behind its CompStat crime database existed for years, the NYPD was the first law-enforcement agency to implement it on a large-scale basis, he says. By providing information about crimes minutes after they've occurred instead of days or months, CompStat gives law-enforcement personnel the ability to move resources to trouble spots quickly.
Many of the most recent initiatives are direct outgrowths of the terrorist attacks. After the calamity exposed the city's lack of preparedness for dealing with a major disaster, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly hired consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to study what went wrong. McKinsey found weaknesses in command and control, communications, intelligence, and planning, and it proposed sweeping changes. Among them was a wireless communications network; all hardwired communications in lower Manhattan were lost within minutes of the attacks, and cellular service was all but shut down.
McKinsey also recommended that hardwired communications be improved, with redundant lines installed at NYPD's headquarters, Brooklyn's Metrotech Center where 911 operations are based, and field commands down to the precinct level. Had Sonet Ring, the new WAN scheduled to go live in June, been in place on 9/11, hardwired communications would have been restored within minutes, says Jim Onalfo, the NYPD's deputy commissioner and CIO.
The overall goal, Onalfo says, is to design an infrastructure that will let the police department function under any circumstances.
New York is unique among large cities in its use of analog radio communications. Most other cities have switched to digital networks. The NYPD's cars are equipped with mobile data terminals that are very secure but slow, Onalfo says. "We can't move fingerprints or photos across that network." Ironically, the analog radio network turned out to be dependable during the chaos of 9/11. "Every other system went down, but the radio system continued to function," Gilmartin says.
The city is in the process of equipping patrol cars with laptops, letting cops receive the basic details of a dispatch, such as the address and nature of an emergency, whether people with criminal records are known to reside at that address, and if weapons or drugs were found there previously. Time frames for tasks such as license checks and pulling arrest records, which could take hours, have been cut to seconds. The transmission capacity of the wireless communications network could eventually be increased to handle photos, fingerprints, and voice messages. The city has also explored the use of handheld computers and digital cell phones with cameras, but they're considered too expensive for now.
Police officers use the laptops to enter complaint forms; previously, they had to be filled out on paper, shipped to the precinct, reviewed by a desk sergeant, certified, and entered into the system. Entering information into the system quickly is essential for giving analysts a picture of criminal patterns as they're developing.
To date, 2,800 cars have been outfitted with laptops at a cost of $20 million; another $8 million is needed for the remainder of the 3,400-car fleet. Rewiring the city's 76 precincts, nine service areas, and 12 transit districts to Sonet Ring will cost another $25 million, of which $5 million has been allocated. The computer-aided dispatch system has been fully funded at $48 million; Hewlett-Packard, the prime contractor, is expected to have the system ready by next year.
These sums are a drop in the bucket for a department with 37,000 uniformed officers, 13,000 support personnel, and an operating budget of $5 billion a year-about 10% of the city's operating budget. The job of funding IT projects, largely a matter of uncovering alternative sources of financing such as federal grants, has been eased under the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose cam- paign platform included using technology to help solve the city's problems. Bloomberg works within limits to get projects funded, Gilmartin says.
Bloomberg was involved-personally by sitting in on planning sessions and through the city's CIO, Gino Menchini -in planning the city's 311 nonemergency hot line and linking it up with the 911 system. Today, emergency calls are forwarded from the 311 center in lower Manhattan to the appropriate precinct, where they're displayed on a screen in front of a dispatcher, who then radios them to officers in patrol cars or at command posts. The city has also agreed to fund a program to combine the separate dispatch centers of the city's police, fire, and emergency medical service responders into a single Public Service Answering Center.
To prevent cost overruns and avoid projects getting killed as a result, Bloomberg in May hired Onalfo as the police department's first CIO. He and Gilmartin worked in tandem until Gilmartin's retirement in late February, Gilmartin applying his 37 years of field experience and Onalfo his 30 years of project-management experience. The job of selling IT to Bloomberg and other city officials is easier than in the private sector, Onalfo says. "Everybody understands the relationship between technology and law enforcement."
That wasn't always the case. In 1994, when the CompStat database of crime statistics consisted of floppy disks, top brass was skeptical. Gradually, they began to grasp its significance as a resource-planning tool for the city, borough, and precinct commands. At first, colored push-pins and a wall map were used to discern crime patterns and deploy resources; now it's done through computer graphics software.
CompStat has evolved into a benchmark for comparing the effectiveness of law-enforcement agencies. In New York, crime levels have continued to drop while they've picked up elsewhere. "As an outsider, I believe it has to do with CompStat and the way NYPD approaches its mission," Onalfo says.
Statistics bear him out. New York is safer than the nation as a whole. In 2002, the city reported 3,100 crimes per 100,000 population, versus a national average of 4,120, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.
After the terrorist attacks, the NYPD hired Frank Libutti, a Marine lieutenant general, as chief of counterterrorism (he has since moved on to the federal Department of Homeland Security) and David Cohen of the CIA as chief of intelligence. They've applied the same information-collection and -analysis principles that had proven successful against ordinary crime in the war against terror.
Still, gaps remain, especially when it comes to sharing information among law-enforcement agencies. Even a simple thing like knowing when someone has been paroled from prison would be welcome, Gilmartin says. "Instead of discovering Joe Blow is back out on the street because I've picked up his MO three of four times, I'd like to be told that beforehand."
Write to Steven Marlin at smarlin@cmp.com
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NYPD At A Glance
How the numbers add up in New York
- Employs 37,000 officers and 13,000 civilian personnel
- Operates 3,400 patrol cars and 36,000 radios
- Responds to 4.5 million emergency calls a year
- Fills out 1.3 million arrest and complaint forms annually
- Arrests 340,000 individuals and prosecutes 45,000 each year
Data: New York Police Department
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