Future Cops: New York's Real Time Crime Center

As a private eye running a one-man agency, the tools I use to help people in trouble are usually limited to muscle, guts, observation and deduction. P.I. work usually calls for a lot of legwork, the kind the police can’t afford to do. They don’t’ have the time or the manpower. One thing I have in common with the cops is we both laugh at the stylized world of law enforcement you see on TV, where every crime can be solved in an hour.

You probably know that I used to be one of those cops, then a police detective in NYC and then with the Secret Service. That’s why I keep an eye on what’s going on in their business. And since my girl Cindy wants me to make entries into this blog thing, I figured somebody might want to hear about some of the stuff that might make that one-hour per crime thing a reality someday.

When I was a New York beat cop they didn’t have a Real Time Crime Center. It’s like a super detective help desk, the nerve center for technology to help the detectives out there on the streets with the kind of information that helps you develop leads and solve crimes.

You know how on TV the cops can just type stuff in and get instant info? That’s what they’re trying to do with the Real Time Crime Center. Information networking they call it, but to me it’s just good old crime analysis. COMPSTAT, for Computerized Statistics, is a weekly precinct-by-precinct analysis of crime trends and hot spots. In New York, they can reduce violent crimes by putting 1,500 cops into a targeted location. That’s how NYC got to be the safest large city in the USA.

The next step is to look at crime data and intel in real time and shoot it out to the cops so they can see crime patterns and trends. Not only could they use their resources better to fight crime, but they could support investigators better to ID and catch the bad guys faster.

When I chat with my old pals on the force I’m amazed at how they’ve made different sources electronically searchable and user friendly. I swear the department up there must have 50 huge databases, all crime data warehouse from IBM to put all that info into a common format. They hooked the last 10 years of complaints, arrests and detective case information into a real-time feed from the 911 system.

The Real Time Crime Center has access to more than 120 million New York City criminal and arrests complaints and 911 call records dating back to 1995, more than 5 million New York State criminal records, parole and probation files, 31 million national crime records and 35 billion public records. Detectives can search the data sources easily, almost like using Google. If you can search for, say, a white male, 5-foot-8-inches to 6-foot, doing robberies, in the Bronx, uses a silver gun, and targets old ladies," well, that can save a lot of the grunt work gathering your list of suspects.

The NYPD sends an incident response vehicle with every homicide squad in the five boroughs and one major case squad. These vans are on scene for all serious stabbings, shootings and homicides. With secure wireless access to the Real Time Crime Center, detectives can access and print out anything they need, out in the field.

Think about it. Before the detective starts to canvas the area, he’s got details about his location. incidents and arrests within a given distance of this crime, parolees, probationers and wanted felons in the area, open narcotics investigations, gang activity, the whole ball of wax. This is the stuff I’d love to know at a murder scene. Have there been a lot of drug arrests in the area? Is there a sexual predator nearby? Who the nosey neighbor that calls 911 all the time? The kind of stuff beat cops used to know.

And the Real Time Crime Center can put it all up on a screen. The detective gets a visual representation of the suspect or the location. He can see the relationships the suspect has with other criminals, other crimes, other cases, guns, and so on. We call it a link analysis, with one person or location at the center. Then, graphical links are shown to phone numbers, known addresses, relatives, criminal records, whatever.

Another new trick is called crime mapping. The Real Time Crime Center identifies crimes and trends that used to require days for analysts to dope out. The Geographic Information System lets you even show where all the complaints are that make up what you think is a pattern. You can see all the crimes near bus stations, for example or near schools. This kind of pattern analysis is great for robberies or sex crimes.

The Real Time Crime Center even helps the cops when crimes cross jurisdictions. New York has been able to hook up with other agencies in and out of New York State, like the New York/New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Regional Intelligence Center. I’ll tell you about that some time.

New York is THE big city, but I think the concept of the Real Time Crime Center can work for any police force. It saves more man-hours than anybody can count. And it gets the technology down to the street. Right now about 700 of New York’s finest have direct access to the Real Time Crime Center, but when it’s complete, more like 5,000 detectives will, not to mention the narcotics investigators, terrorist investigators and organized crime units. If this keeps up, old fashioned private eyes like me might end up out of business.

I hope I didn’t bore you. I know that was just a lot of shop talk but like I said, I have a real interest in the latest good news in law enforcement. If you don’t care how cops are solving crimes these days, well, you ought to be reading somebody else’s blog.