Bloomberg, Kelly Announce Expansion of City’s Real Time Crime Center

A room in One Police Plaza is allowing police to keep tabs on New York in “real time.”Allowing officers access to satellite images from space and images from dozens of cameras posted throughout the city, the Real Time Crime Center “has quickly become a powerful tool in our efforts to protect New Yorkers and make the safest big city in the nation even safer,” Mayor Bloomberg said at a press conference announcing the expansion of the center.In the not so distant future, the Police Department will have 500 more cameras to monitor, with a minimum of 50 in each of the city’s eight patrol boroughs, Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.Since it opened in July 2005, the $11 million Real Time Crime Center “has played a key role in the investigation of hundreds of violent crimes in all five boroughs,” the mayor said.The expansion will augment the use of the center in investigating “all major and violent crime,” not just shootings and murders, Mr. Bloomberg said. In addition, arrest records will now date back to 1995. The system will provide diagrams linking suspects and locations, and detectives will have remote access to the data warehouse through 175 new wireless laptops.Acting as “a one-stop distribution point for all kinds of information crucial to solving crimes,” Mr. Bloomberg said, the crime center houses billions of records, including New York City, state, and national criminal records, New York State parole and probation files, 911 call logs, and other public records.Mr. Kelly ticked off several cases, including the recent and unrelated fatalities of three police officers, in which the center’s resources proved useful in the investigations. He also said a robbery suspect was caught when his “Sugar” tattoo was identified via a database of tattoos.Mr. Bloomberg said that since its inception, the center has supported the investigation of more than 800 shootings and nearly 300 homicides.Historically, Mr. Bloomberg said, detectives have been responsible for “returning to their precinct and gathering and analyzing records and other data on their own, an often painstaking and time-consuming process.” The center, he said, makes officers “much more able to use their minds and have to spend less time on just sifting through paper.”One precinct detective acknowledged that the center is a good resource, but said he did not use it because “I like doing my own investigations.”“The more information the police officers have the more equipped they are to do their jobs,” the president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York, Richard Aborn, said.The deputy director of the criminal justice research and evaluation center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Michael White, praised the center.“I don’t know of anywhere else that is anywhere near this level of sophistication,” Mr. White, who is also an assistant professor at the school, said. “This whole idea is really innovative. We continue to move away from that traditional police model where police officers ride around” in their cars, waiting for a call for service. “The NYPD is kind of leading that charge,” he said.A former police officer and professor in the law and police science department at John Jay College, Eugene O’Donnell, said of the center, “It’s got gigantic promise.” He added, “Some of these records are so fragmented and out of reach. The future is being able to access those kinds of records.”

Bloomberg, Kelly Announce Expansion of City’s Real Time Crime Center

Bloomberg, Kelly Announce Expansion of City’s Real Time Crime Center

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