New York Police Chief Ray Kelly

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R.K.: CompStat is a system that we have in place here, on a borough basis, where commanders would come in and the borough commander would question what's going on in their precinct. What they did is simply take the system and put it on a citywide basis. We're doing something else here. We have a real-time crime center—did anyone talk to you about this? It really doesn't exist anywhere else in the country. What we have done is create a data warehouse here. When this administration came in here in 2002, we were still one of the world's biggest users of Wite-Out and carbon paper.

L.G.: And now you're so high-tech that when you read books, you do it on a Kindle?

R.K.: Yep, it's amazing. You can download it, you buy it for under $10, and it downloads in 30 seconds, I get the New York Times on it every day, automatically it shows up, and you can carry 50 books in it.

L.G.: So you're state of the art—no carbon paper and Wite-Out for you, man.

R.K.: We did lead the league, though—55 million drums of Wite-Out. And we have changed it significantly, brought in 12,000 computers, brought in the C.I.O. [chief information officer] from outside, and I got a recommendation from Lou Gerstner.

L.G.: The former I.B.M. chief executive.

R.K.: Right, and Jim Onalfo is our C.I.O. He was the C.I.O. of Kraft Foods and Stanley Works [the tool manufacturer]. But we had put in place this idea to create this data warehouse, we opened this in 2005, so we are pushing out real-time information when a crime happens, okay? CompStat is a retrospective look at what you did, for commanders to handle your crime problems. It's an auditing process.

L.G.: And it's a rather rough one.

R.K.: Well, it's direct, but it's lost a lot of that reputation.

L.G.: It's no longer like an EST session—people locked in a room and screamed at?

R.K.: No, no. So this is the other side of the coin. This is after the crime happens to push information to investigators in the field. I was just out at a shooting scene. We had six people shot, and we had one of them killed. 

L.G.: Today?
 
R.K.: Just today, in Brooklyn, in the 88th precinct. An off-duty policewoman was shot in the foot. She's in there getting a haircut, but two males chase this individual, shot other people in the process, but shoot him in the head and kill him. So, when a crime like this happens, we dispatch vans from the real-time crime center. A van was out there, they are gathering information, and pushing information out to the investigators who were on the scene. It's kind of a big deal, lots of cops there. One of the classic examples I give is, we always had a tattoo file. Like, I run somebody with a tattoo and it says "Ray" on it, you record that. But we weren't able to easily access it. With the real-time crime center, we access it. Shortly after this center opened, a Sbarro's was robbed on Fifth Avenue. Somebody comes in, he had "sugar" tattooed on his neck, so we go through our real-time crime center, access the tattoo file. Most people arrested with the "sugar" tattoo are women, but we had this guy, picked him out of photo array, showed it to people, and arrested him right away. It's a simple example. We have billions of pieces of information that's available—both proprietary information that we have in-house and external databases that we push out to the field. The notion is that we're dealing with recidivists here, so if we get people who commit crimes off the street more quickly, we're going to reduce crime. It's working.

L.G.: What have you done in terms of increasing the number of cameras in the city?
 
R.K.: We have put in our own program of 550 cameras. We did that in all five boroughs. The program is finished. We put them in high-crime areas. We had a federal grant to enable us to do that. I would love to put another layer of those cameras in place. Now there's the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, you familiar with this at all? Okay. Lower Manhattan is still the most sensitive area, from Canal Street south, 1.7 square miles. So, we are putting in place a Lower Manhattan Security Initiative that will involve 3,000 cameras—1,000 public-sector cameras, 2,000 private-sector cameras, about 130 license-plate readers—some mobile, most fixed. Also actual physical barriers that can wall off the area in extreme situations, and a coordination center, at 55 Broadway, on the 28th floor. We will bring in public- and private-sector stakeholders, and, again, it's another big-screen operation that will provide an enhanced security with about 600 additional police officers as it's planned now, and encompasses the World Trade Center site, and it has the Goldman Sachs Tower, the World Financial Center, New York Stock Exchange, Bank of New York, Mercantile Exchange, and, of course, everything that's going to be built—the Freedom Tower and other buildings at the World Trade Center site. That is going to be done in conjunction with Securing the Cities, which is a federally financed program. We're going to use state of the art, and we're already distributing state-of-the-art radiation detectors from 50 miles out. It'll be merged with this program. It's the first city in the country to have this, and on the screen we'll be able to see. I've signed a memorandum of understand with at least 22 other jurisdictions, so that we're all in this together. The notion is that if we get a reading on our detectors—

L.G.: Like a dirty bomb?
 
R.K.: Exactly. Radiation is coming in and it's out in New Jersey, it goes up on the screen, we're all tied in together. So with these radiation detectors, we will have cameras, we will have license-plate readers at all 19 of the entry points into Manhattan. So it'll be a very densely covered area.
 
L.G.: What do you say to civil libertarians? I guess that's different. If you were just a corporate C.E.O., you'd be doing this and not everybody would be throwing brickbats at you.
 

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