Police Surveillance May Earn Money for City

By SAM ROBERTS

A unique public-private partnership that joined gut-level police acumen with advanced computer algorithms is proceeding toward two goals that rarely coincide: The policing system is making New York safer and it will also make money for the city, which is marketing it to other jurisdictions.

In the six months since the Domain Awareness System was unveiled, officials of Microsoft, which designed the system with the New York Police Department, said they have been surprised by the response and are actively negotiating with a number of prospective buyers, whom Microsoft declined to identify.

“The interest from the United States has come from smaller municipalities, from sheriff’s departments, and police chiefs from several major cities,” said Dave Mosher, vice president of Microsoft Services. “Outside the U.S., large sporting events have approached us, and also law enforcement — people who are interested in providing public security.”

Buyers would pay to access the software (at least several million dollars and more depending on the size of the jurisdiction and whether specifications have to be customized). New York City will receive 30 percent of the gross revenues from the sale of the system and access to any innovations developed for new customers. The revenue will be directed to counterterrorism and crime prevention programs.

The new system incorporates more than 3,500 cameras in public places, license-plate readers at every major Manhattan entry point, fixed and portable radiation detectors, real-time alerts transmitted from the 911 emergency system and a trove of Police Department data, including arrests and parking summonses.

The system cost about $30 million and took several years to put into effect. Since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced in August that the system would be marketed elsewhere, it has figured in a number of investigative coups that went beyond the system’s original purpose of counterterrorism in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attack.

Surveillance footage fed to a windowless suite on Lower Broadway tracked a 20-year-old Bangladeshi man in the fall as he scoped out the fortresslike Federal Reserve Bank downtown, his target for a car-bomb attack (the videotaped evidence led to his guilty plea in February).

Officers responding to reports of shots fired outside the Empire State Building in August were immediately alerted that the victim had been felled by a single gunman and that there was no apparent terrorist threat.

While the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has hailed the innovative software as “a transformative tool” for law enforcement, it has also raised privacy concerns.

Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, warned on The Huffington Post in January that the system was so encompassing that even with built-in legal and technological constraints, it subjected the public to a potential invasion of privacy “much greater than anything we have seen so far.”

The Police Department says it is scrupulous about ensuring the system is not misused.

Richard Daddario, the department’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, said that the system had been developed after “we looked at the software that was available and didn’t find anything that met our needs.

“In 2006,” he said, “we hired Microsoft to build a customized application and by 2010 we developed a product that is head and shoulders above anything on the market, for the reason alone that it was developed by cops for cops after thousands of hours of focus groups about what they do and how they do it to help them do it better.”

Mr. Mosher of Microsoft said that while “the scale of what the N.Y.P.D. does is unmatched by most places in the world,” the design goal was applicable everywhere, “for the technical complexities to melt away so the cops can focus on doing their job and less about navigating 17 screens.”

Mr. Daddario said, “The more quality information you get to act on intelligently, the more efficient you are and the fewer mistakes you make."