Data Warehouse Helps Gotham Get Real on Crime

Data Warehouse Helps Gotham Get Real on Crime

CIO James Onalfo can't seem to retire. After a 30-year career at General Foods as well as Kraft Foods International, Onalfo was recruited by the Stanley Works to navigate Y2K issues. Then, three years later, he answered the call for help from New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly, whose department needed an IT overhaul. In a post-9/11 world, the idea of contributing to public safety held an irresistible appeal for Onalfo. First he installed laptops in police cars and equipped precincts with 12,000 new computers.

But his biggest project was the creation of the Real Time Crime Center, which opened in July 2005. The crime center includes an IBM data warehouse that contains 15 years of data on arrests, aliases, warrants and the like. "We now have a lot of information online that's searchable by text and numerical queries," Onalfo says. "It takes a lot of the grunt work away from detectives." So if homicide detectives are working a call in a building where a parolee lives, their counterparts seated at computers can retrieve that data in real time. "It will give those on the scene a head start, and that can be the difference to quickly solving the case," Onalfo says.

Crime rates have dropped 20% in the past four years, a statistic influenced by plenty of variables. But, says Onalfo, "We've eliminated untold hours spent by detectives sitting at their desks searching for information," he says. "They can now focus on doing their work."

Megan Santosus, a former senior editor at CIO Decisions, is now a features editor for SearchDataCenter.com. Write to her at msantosus@techtarget.com.

This was first published in February 2007