Developing the NYPD's Information Technology
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Developing the NYPD’s Information Technology “The democratization of data has become the central theme of the NYPD’s technology planning and future: the concept of placing information, real-time analysis, and intelligence directly in the hands of officers, whether they are at a desk or in the field, to pro- mote safety, efficiency, and effectiveness.” The major technology initiatives of the previ- The Bloomberg Administration and Commis- ous NYPD administration were focused on orga- sioner Kelly ensured that OIT had the resources nizing and consolidating data for law enforcement to develop new and revolutionary systems, and use. Yet, until recently, only a handful of special- the Department made enormous strides on the in- ized commands had access to the Department’s formation technology front. OIT became increas- many sources of data. Commissioner William ingly civilianized, developed a preliminary disas- Bratton made it a priority for the Information ter recovery system, established digital arrest Technology Bureau to open these data sources to processing (commonly known as OMNIFORM), the entire Department. The democratization of provided email for all executives and upgraded its data has become the central theme of the NYPD’s network. technology planning and future: the concept of placing information, real-time analysis, and intel- “The Bloomberg Administration and Commis- ligence directly in the hands of officers, whether they are at a desk or in the field, to promote safe- sioner Kelly ensured that OIT had the resourc- ty, efficiency, and effectiveness. es to develop new and revolutionary systems, and the Department made enormous strides In the 21st century, all NYPD officers should on the information technology front.” have direct, self-service access to data from all sources appropriate to the performance of their OIT also developed an analytic and investi- duties, with the exception of certain highly sen- gative support suite unlike anything the Depart- sitive or legally constrained sources. Self-service, ment had ever seen. On top of the newly devel- rather than service through an intermediary, pro- oped digital arrest processing system, OIT built vides a level of access and immediacy that will the Crime Data Warehouse (CDW), COGNOS, the greatly enhance the speed and quality of investi- Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), the Enterprise gations as well as the response to incidents. Case Management System (ECMS) for managing investigative cases and a license plate reader da- tabase. These systems brought the Department’s crime analytics into the 21st Century and pro- vided vastly improved technology in support of REFORMS UNDER COMMISSIONER KELLY NYPD’s overall mission. Prior to 2002, the Department’s information technology capabilities were managed by police officers as opposed to IT professionals. When Commissioner Raymond Kelly was appointed by ACHIEVING DATA DEMOCRATIZATION Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, the new commissioner abolished the title chief of Information Technology To make data democratization a reality, the and appointed the Office of Information Technolo- Department must make significant investments gy’s (OIT) first deputy commissioner, James Onalfo. in infrastructure, applications, security, platform Unlike the police chiefs who had run OIT before consolidation and network. The Office of Infor- him, Deputy Commissioner Onalfo had a back- mation Technology has been reconstituted as the ground in commercial information technology. Information Technology Bureau. The bureau has DEVELOPING THE NYPD’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 1 estimated a cost of $350 million to complete the high-bandwidth data; modernization of the IT landscape at the NYPD necessary to meet the Department’s current and 2. The capability to support best security future operational needs. Essentially, the invest- practices; ment will provide the ground from which new De- partment applications and capabilities can grow. 3. The capability to support a reliable An additional $83 million will be needed over the failover system; next five years to support information exchange 4. And cost effectiveness. with other city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and with public safety and criminal jus- Historically, the NYPD has been largely tice entities. reliant on leases with telecommunications pro- viders resulting in both high costs and generally “To make data democratization a reality, the insufficient network capability. Consequently, the NYPD has decided to build a new network, called Department must make significant invest- FINEST 2.0, with proprietary fiber. ments in infrastructure, applications, security, platform consolidation and network.” The Information Technology Bureau is in the process of building this new network by running hundreds of miles of fiber-optic Neither the complexity nor the necessity of lines, ultimately connecting every NYPD this undertaking should be underestimated. Tech- facility in the city. This will increase band- nology has changed dramatically in the decade or width to the precincts by a factor of 100 more since much of the Department’s existing in- times. In addition, diverse routing paths formation technology systems were built. The De- will ensure reliability through redundancy. partment’s information technology infrastructure, platforms, and applications are currently a mix of By replacing the leased lines with propri- aging systems, supported by end-of-life hardware, etary fiber, the Department will benefit from built on decades-old infrastructure, and run on lower lifetime costs as well as the capabili- unsupported platforms. The solution cannot be ty to support high-bandwidth applications, limited to improving certain applications or swa- including video, video teleconferencing and ping out pieces of hardware. The solution must voice-over-IP, among other beneficial capa- be wholesale replacement of the Department’s in- bilities. The cost for the Finest 2.0 network formation technology systems. And that is what to connect all NYPD facilities has been esti- Commissioner Bratton has set out to do. mated at $53 million. “The solution must be wholesale replacement of the Department’s information technology The NYPD will not stop there. Plans are in place to expand the fiber network to connect systems.” non-NYPD sites that have camera feeds or other data sources that the Department wishes to access in real-time. For exam- UPGRADING THE NYPD’S NETWORK: ple, the New York City Housing Author- ity (NYCHA) has spent millions of dollars FINEST 2.0 installing cameras at its facilities, but the NYPD does not have access to these feeds The series of wholesale replacements will because its current network does not con- begin at the most fundamental level, the net- nect to NYCHA. The NYPD cannot view work across which all NYPD data traverses. The these cameras in real-time or use them effi- Department’s main network, called the FINEST ciently during investigations. The estimat- network, was designed in 2002 to support only ba- ed five-year total to build a new network sic data applications. Over the past 12 years, the that connects not only all NYPD facilities Department has been adding to the FINEST net- but also NYCHA developments and other work in a piecemeal way, resulting in a network city agencies is $104 million. The NYPD in- capability that has been insufficient in four key tends to expand on the fiber network in a areas: cost-efficient manner by leveraging existing city resources, such as the private fiber ca- 1. The capability to reliably transmit bles owned by other agencies. DEVELOPING THE NYPD’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 2 UPGRADING THE DEPARTMENT’S “The challenges of the current NYPD’s data- DATACENTERS center can be overcome by moving to a hybrid datacenter solution that leverages on-premis- In addition to the network itself, the NYPD es, off-premises, and cloud models.” datacenter is the other key piece of information technology infrastructure that currently con- strains the goal of democratizing data across o The two redundant datacenters will the Department. The Department’s progress in be complemented with cloud building out a number of information technology capabilities that provide low cost, capabilities has been stalled because of the lack of high reliability, ample security, and appropriate datacenter space. enormous flexibility. The estimated five-year costs are $64 million for the primary datacenter and $19 million for the backup center. Datacenters house computing equipment, servers, storage and network gear to enable data • The NYPD will also seek to remove processing and storage. In general, datacenters antiquated computing platforms and must have physical space for equipment, highly bring the workload to a standardized redundant electrical power, and adequate cool- NYPD platform using virtual machines ing. The primary NYPD datacenter is severely that will consolidate systems, cut costs constrained in physical space, power and cooling and reduce operational complexity. capacity. These datacenter constraints, as well as These improvements will cost an the fact that many of the NYPD’s critical systems estimated $16 million over the next were developed on antiquated platforms for which five years. maintenance is costly and operationally complex, have stymied the NYPD’s ability to build comput- ing and storage capabilities to support the De- partment’s operational, investigative and analytic BUILDING THE NYPD’S FIRST COMPRE- needs. HENSIVE DATA FUSION SYSTEM • The challenges of the current NYPD’s datacenter