On May 3 we held our fourth Innovation Lecture in the series jointly sponsored by IBM and MIT's Engineering Systems Division. Systems Solutions to Real World Challenges at NYPD: The Real-Time Crime Center was delivered by Jim Onalfo, CIO and Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) .
The NYPD is the largest municipal police force in the world. It handles 11.5 million 911 calls, sends out 4.5 million police cars on radio runs, is responsible for 45,000 prosecutions and has a staff of roughly 53,000 people, of which over 37,000 are police officers. The NYPD is led by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, to whom Jim Onalfo directly reports.
From the moment a crime is detected and reported, and throughout its investigation, police departments have become very good at generating broad and diverse streams of information related to that crime. However, it has been very difficult to bring all that information together along with the proper tools to make it usable in practice. When Ray Kelly was appointed by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to his second term as NYPD commissioner in 2002, he entered the job with a key vision: let police officers focus on what they do best - solve crimes and apprehend criminals - by freeing them from the overwhelming paperwork they have to deal with, and providing them with the systems and tools they need to quickly find the information required to do the job.
Commissioner Kelly realized that to do so, he needed to not just upgrade the IT systems of the NYPD - an area that had gone underinvested for many years, - but it was critical that he appoint the proper leader who would develop the world class information systems required to implement his vision. So he asked a number of people from the private sector, including Nick Donofrio and Lou Gertner to recommend the best possible CIO for the job.
As it turned out, Jim Onalfo had recently retired as CIO of Stanley Works, after having previously also retired as CIO of Kraft, and he was recommend by Donofrio and Gerstner as the best candidate to become the first ever NYPD CIO. After meeting with Kelly and Bloomberg, Onalfo once more came out of retirement and accepted the job "because,” he explained, “I thought it would be an important thing to do. It's probably the most important thing I've ever worked at, because I'm helping police officers and the safety of the city. That kind of role interested me.”
Throughout his long career, Onalfo believed that a CIO must start his job with a well defined systems plan. But when he arrived at the NYPD in May of 2003 he was in for a shock. He discovered that the department not only had no systems plan at all, but they actually had no disaster recovery plan with redundancy and backup sites. If there had been a fire in one of the precincts, for example, the officers would not have been able to process criminals within the 24-hour time frame established by state law and the perps would have walked. He said that "I almost left the same day I got here because I didn’t want to be responsible for that."
But he stuck it out, and had to focus at first on fixing the infrastructure and revamping the organization. He then turned his attention to developing the strategic IT plans needed to implement Ray Kelly's vision to help police officers do their jobs better through the use of information technologies. These efforts led to NYPD's Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), which cost $12 million to build and opened its doors in July of 2005. The Real Time Crime Center has already garnered a number of awards for the NYPD and for Jim Onalfo, including being named to Computerworld’s premier list of IT executives for 2007.
I visited the Real Time Crime Center at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan when I went to see Jim Onalfo to discuss the MIT lecture. The central room in the Crime Center looks like a kind of futuristic NASA or Pentagon command and control facility. There is a movie-theater-size screen on the front wall flashing information about crimes in progress, including whatever data has already been collected on the criminal suspects and their victims. A ticker along the bottom notes incoming 911 emergency calls.
The Crime Center is staffed around the clock with 15 sophisticated analyst workstations manned by about 40 highly experienced detectives. They have access to a Crime Data Warehouse consisting of over 5 million NY State criminal records, parole and probation files; over 20 million NY City criminal complaints, 911/311 calls and summonses; over 31 million national crime records and over 33 billion public records. The Crime Center uses satellite imaging and sophisticated precint-by-precint mappings of New York City to enable detectives to track suspects at all their known addresses and anticipate the locations they are most likely to flee.
The Real Time Control Center aims to provide valuable information to police officers even before they reach the crime scene, so they hit the ground running and can better identify and apprehend criminals. "The system provides officers with real time information on criminal suspects, including recent address and telephone numbers, arrest and parole information and even nicknames and tattoos, valuable information that may have taken investigators weeks to obtain through paper records." It also "provides officers with clues to help solve violent criminal investigations and identify emerging crime patters with unprecedented speed." It is an important crime-fighting managing tool, giving officers an accurate representation of police resources and availability throughout the five boroughs of New York.
In my introduction of the MIT lecture, I said that it was particularly appropriate to hear about applying technology to real world, complex systems problems at the NYPD, because systems do not get more complex, and the world doesn't get more real than what Deputy Commissioner Onalfo does. It is particularly satisfying and instructive to see how how much progress Jim Onalfo and the NYPD have made in addressing these tough problems by leveraging technology, real time information and solid systems thinking.
Irving - just catching up with your trip to NYPD, we have followed their innovations since the original CompStat days but I haven't been to the RTCC yet. We're using some Web 2.0 style mashups to get the same quality of real-time information onto desktop screens (and under user control, as we talked about at Highlands Forum). Hope you're enjoying "retirement" - ha! best regards - lewis
Posted by: lewis shepherd | July 01, 2007 at 07:42 PM