NYPD’s New Pattern Recognition System

The crime rate in New York has been at an all-time low since the surge it experienced in the 1980s. Recently, the crime rate has declined significantly by 45%. Certain changes in the functionality of the New York Police Department (NYPD) were one of the reasons for this decline.

One such change is the introduction of a pattern recognition program that has enabled the police department to catch criminals at an increasingly successful rate. This recognition system is called the Patternizr.

When was it installed?

The Patternizr was first deployed in the NYPD in 2016 but its introduction to the department wasn’t revealed to the public. It was only recently that the announcement was made that such a system has helped NYPD win several cases. NYPD claims that it’s the first institution in the US to make use of such an effective tool for crime fighting.

What does it do?

The system makes use of the existing case reports at NYPD and digs into them to form a pattern of criminal activity. The system is also equipped for bringing in additional information from the internet so generating patterns for a crime that might have occurred outside of NYPD can also be used to determine if they were committed by the same person. It links 77 department precincts to compare crimes like robberies, murders, and thefts to generate common patterns.

While some may argue that the recognition system can be rigged to target a certain marginalized group from the society, such doubts were put to ease when it was revealed that the software doesn’t examine the race of the crime suspects to reduce any racial biases.

The results and what they mean for future candidates

The goal of Patternizr has been to improve the safety of the public and it is doing so by allowing the officers and detectives to widen their search criteria by reducing the time and energy it would take to go through the files physically. Officers that have solved cases using Patternizr claim that they would never have been able to solve crime faster had they been using traditional methods.

With the increased efficiency of NYPD’s pattern recognition system, it’s necessary to employ police officers who are able to exercise critical thinking skills that allow them to evaluate the information given by the system as quickly as possible.

Join the classes at Civil Service Success to ensure you pass Suffolk County New York civil service exam with the help of their rigorous courses and highly qualified instructors.

  • Scroll to Top