They know where you are and what you’re doing.
Soon, they’ll know where you’ve been, if you have a criminal record and whether you’re emitting even the slightest bit of radiation.
Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly unveiled a new system yesterday that integrates video surveillance from 3,000 street cameras with the NYPD’s vast database to provide cops with “one-stop shopping” to track potential terrorists and criminals.
The capabilities of the so-called Domain Awareness System, developed jointly by Microsoft and the NYPD, were on a par with those in fictional high-tech TV crime dramas.
“We’re not your mom-and-pop’s Police Department anymore,” boasted the mayor. “We are in the next century. We are leading the pack.”
In a demonstration at the NYPD’s lower Manhattan video surveillance center, Jessica Tisch, director of policy and planning for the counterterrorism unit, showed how police handled a 911 call of a “suspicious package” near Union Square on Sunday.
In an instant, cops were able to call up cameras at the scene and see footage taken before the call came in. That allowed cops to determine “when the package was left, who had left it there.”
Kelly said the system has already proven its worth by locating a murder suspect in Queens through the suspect’s vehicle, which was spotted by one of the NYPD’s license-plate readers.
“We can track where a car associated with a murder suspect is currently located and where it’s been over the past several days, weeks or months,” he said.
Even parking tickets will turn up when a suspect’s name comes up on the system.
Microsoft plans to market the system to authorities around the nation and the world. The city gets 30 percent of the proceeds.
Kelly said the need for the NYPD to enter the computer era was evident when he returned for his second stint as commissioner in 2002.
“When I came back to the Police Department in 2002, I found out the department was still a very big user of whiteout and carbon paper,” he recalled.