While there was a lot of hype about a report that the NYPD is testing Google Glass, in the short-term a policy-shift toward more accessible NYPD data has the potential to be more consequential for New Yorkers at large.
At a talk Friday, new NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton promised that the police force would be more open and make its data available in more accessible formats, City and State and others reported. “There should be no secrets in the NYPD. We are going to do more to open up the organization, to make it more inclusive, to make our information more readily available to the public, and to try and format it in a way that is more easily retrievable," he said. City and State also reported that Bratton intends to name a deputy commissioner for information technology in the coming days to work with the City Council to achieve that goal. Bratton, who recently officially started a Twitter account as commissioner and posted about a CompStat meeting, also discussed how social media data could inform the NYPD about attitudes in different precincts.
More accessible NYPD data, especially related to fatal traffic collisions, is already high on the agenda for the new City Council leadership as part of a larger government accessibility and transparency push by Bronx City Council member James Vacca, chair of the technology committee, and Upper East Side City Council member Ben Kallos, chair of the government operations committee. Continue>>>
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